Via the PEN Newsletter: WHITE SUPREMACY IS NOT COLOR BLIND
A Supreme Court ruling this summer on voluntary integration plans of Louisville and Seattle schools could sound the death knell for Brown v. Board of Education, warn the editors of Rethinking Schools in their spring issue. If the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to uphold voluntary integration plans in these two cities, it would wipe out the last vestiges of the 1954 Brown decision still in place. Over the years, the court has so chipped away at Brown that it is a mere shell of a decision, honored in speeches every Martin Luther King Jr. holiday but ignored in practice 365 days of the year. While conservatives argue that race-conscious policies are no longer necessary because the United States is becoming a multiracial, multiethnic society, Theodore Shaw of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund points out that “This country has always been a multiracial, multiethnic society. The problem has never been mere race consciousness. It has been white supremacy.” The editors challenge teachers to find new ways to struggle against our increasingly resegregated schools.
Follow
