Category Archives: Social Studies

Rethinking Schools Editorial: White Supremacy Is Not Color Blind

Editorial: White Supremacy Is Not Color Blind

Spring 2007

By the Editors of Rethinking Schools

In the publishing industry, it’s customary to pre-write the obituaries of famous people who, due to either age or ill-health, are expected to die soon. Then, when death occurs, the obituary is ready to go.

Unfortunately, an obituary pre-write is needed for the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took aim at a major structure of Jim Crow racism and outlawed separate- but-equal schools for blacks and whites.

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.

By summer, the Court is expected to issue a ruling that will get rid of even the shell. Brown will die.

The decision involves voluntary integration plans in Seattle and Louisville that have been challenged because race is one of several factors used to maintain diversity as students are assigned to schools. Few expect the court to uphold the Louisville and Seattle efforts.

“The only question was how far the court would go in ruling such plans unconstitutional,” the New York Times noted after the Dec. 4 oral arguments.

Widespread Repercussions

The significance of the cases goes beyond schools. As Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, has noted, opponents of voluntary integration make an argument that “if followed to its logical end, would make it illegal and unconstitutional in this country to do anything voluntarily and consciously about racial inequality.”

Shaw was one of several commentators at a November gathering in Washington to discuss the Supreme Court cases. At the meeting, Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, articulated the prevailing conservative view that those who promote race-conscious integration policies are no different than the segregationists of old because both make determinations based on skin color. What’s more, conservatives argue, race-conscious policies are no longer necessary because the United States is becoming a multiracial, multiethnic society.

But, as Shaw responded, “This country has always been a multiracial, multiethnic society. The problem in this country has never been mere race consciousness. It has been white supremacy.”

There is “no symmetry, moral or legal,” Shaw continued, between the race-consciousness of those struggling against institutions of white supremacy and the race-conscious discrimination of those who believe in the superiority of white people. The first is used to include, integrate, and promote equality for all, while the second is used to exclude, segregate, and subordinate those deemed inferior.

The seriousness of the Supreme Court’s likely U-turn on school integration is particularly apparent in the Louisville case. The school system had been under a federal court desegregation order from 1975 to 2000 — in other words, the courts mandated a race-conscious desegregation plan. When that court order expired, the district voluntarily adopted a plan to prevent resegregation. That plan is now under attack.

One of the most galling aspects of the attack is that conservatives are using the historically specific demands of Brown and the civil rights movement — that no one should be denied equal opportunity on the basis of the color of their skin — to argue against the substance of Brown and to bolster white supremacist policies that lock African Americans into segregated, inferior schools.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg most articulately picked up on the Alice-in-Wonderland aspect to the oral arguments. “What’s constitutionally required one day gets constitutionally prohibited the next day,” she noted. “That’s very odd.”

Meanwhile, every year U.S. schools are increasingly segregated.

Given the Court’s hostility to race-conscious efforts to promote equality, the debate will of necessity have to focus on new ways to struggle against segregated schools. Merely decrying the Court’s direction is insufficient.

There are no easy answers, but clearly the debate must evolve. Public education plays a central role in our society. Just because the Court may declare voluntary integration policies illegal does not mean teachers and schools can give up the fight against white supremacy and racial inequality.

Spring 2007

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America, racism, and schools

The effects of racism are undeniable. There are many, many, recent (and ongong) high profile (Katrina/New Orleans) and off the radar (The Jena 6) examples of how racism shapes live in the United States.

Today the US Supreme Court, in a case involving public schools in Louisville and Seattle, sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools. The supremes declared the districts had failed to meet “their heavy burden” of justifying “the extreme means they have chosen — discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.”

The “extreme means” of “discrimination” the supremes refer to is the use of racial categories to create integrated school systems.

The result, at least in Louisville, will be the dismantling of one of the nation’s most fully integrated school districts and, with the sharp racial housing patterns in the Jefferson County, KY, yet another large apartheid school district.

This decision will further the well established pattern of US federal courts striking down desegregation plans and re-creating the apartheid schools of the pre-Civil Rights Era.

Harvard Civil Rights Project research shows that:

Whites are the most segregated group in the nation’s public schools; they attend schools, on average, where eighty percent of the student body is white. Whites attending private schools are even more segregated than their public school counterparts.
Public schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students, nearly twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. In the West and the South, almost half of all public school students are nonwhite.
The data show the emergence of a substantial group of American schools that are virtually all non-white, which we call apartheid schools. These schools educate one-sixth of the nation’s black students and one-fourth of black students in the Northeast and Midwest. These are often schools where enormous poverty, limited resources, and social and health problems of many types are concentrated. One ninth of Latino students attend schools where 99-100% of the student body is composed of minority students.

In addition to the “irony” of striking down school desegregation plans as the nation’s school’s are becoming both more multicultural and more segregated, there is the ongoing travesty of justice (and schooling) that is currently taking place in Jena, Louisiana.

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a “whites only” shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena’s black population didn’t take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could “end their life with a stroke of the pen.”

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles. [From WhileSeated.org
]

Here’s a photo story of the Jena Six:

Articles on the Jena Six:

The Town Talk (Alexandria, LA)
“All-white jury likely to hear racial fight case in Louisiana”, International Herald Tribune
“Looking for Justice in Jena, Louisiana”, CounterPunch
“Charges reduced for student in La. fight”, The Guardian
“Racism goes on trial again in America’s Deep South”, The Guardian
“‘Stealth racism’ stalks deep South”, BBC News

America’s progressive majority?

pro∙gres∙sive (prə-grĕs´ĭv)
adj. 1. moving forward 2. continuing by successive steps 3. favoring better conditions, new policies, ideas, or methods
n. one who is progressive

Yes. At least that’s what an analysis of decades of public opinion polling by the Campaign for America’s Future and Media Matters for America claims.

The façade of conservative political dominance is crumbling. The disintegration runs deeper than public disaffection with the Bush administration’s catastrophic failures and is more fundamental than the political realignment of the 2006 election. The notion of America as a “conservative nation” was always more fiction than fact, but the nation’s rejection of President Bush’s brand of “you’re-on-your-own” conservatism and wedge-issue divisiveness is so broad that today the façade is simply unsustainable.

When it comes to the economy the report, The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America is a Myth, says that

84 percent of American support to increase the minimum wage;
more Americans sympathize with unions than with companies in labor disputes (52 to 34 percent);
nearly twice as many people think the U.S. is more hurt than helped by the global economy (48 to 25 percent);
69 percent of Americans believe government should care for those who can’t care for themselves;
twice as many people want “government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending” (43 percent) as want government to provide fewer services “in order to reduce spending” (20 percent);
majorities say the U.S. needs a bigger government “because the country’s problems are bigger” (59 percent) and a “strong government to handle complex problems” (67 percent).

On social issues too, Americans are more progressive than they are typically credited:

the percentage who consider abortion the “most important” issue ranks in the single digits;
a 56 percent majority oppose making it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, a proportion that has hardly changed in the past 20 years;
only 29 percent want to see Roe v. Wade overturned;
67 percent want sex education in schools to include information about contraception, not just abstinence;
64 percent are willing to pay higher fuel taxes if the money were used for research into renewable energy sources;
75 percent would be willing to pay more for electricity if it were generated by renewable sources like wind or energy;
Only oil companies, conservative politicians and a minority of Americans (41 percent) want to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to drilling.

As for the war:

63 percent of Americans want to set deadlines for withdrawal;
four times as many Americans (48 percent to 12 percent) think the war in Iraq has made the threat of terrorism against the United States worse rather than better.

This is heartening news for progressives, but it begs the question about why Americans continued to vote in politicians (Democrat and Republican) that have not a progressive bone on in their bodies and who remain beholden in capitalist interests and the profit line.

Perhaps a combination of the following accounts provides at least a partial explanation: the folks responding to the polls have checked out of the political process and Americans are subjected to such a high level of right-wing, pro-corporate, TINA propaganda their independence of thought collapses.

Certainly schools and the mass media are culpable in significant ways for the disconnect between the “progressive majority” and the political realities of the U.S.