Is segregation such a bad thing?

It's no secret that Slate has actively cultivated a reputation for contrarianism. Our headline piece over the weekend, in which Jack Shafer took down the clichés of Slate's "green journalism," raises our institutional antagonism to Whitmanesque dimensions. Labels aside, however, there is no shortage of received liberal pieties before which Slate habitually genuflects. Take, for example, the case of racial desegregation in America's public schools.

On June 28^th, the Supreme Court handed down a mammoth decision striking down the use of race as a factor in programs designed to counteract racial discrimination. This decision provoked a blistering dissent from Walter Dellinger in our Supreme Court Breakfast Table, a critical introspection of Brown's intellectual weakness by Risa Goluboff, and a plan of attack for "integration at any cost" by Richard Kahlenberg. Even our designated contrarian, Stuart Taylor, fizzled on the big question: Is racial segregation of America's public schools necessarily a bad thing?

This is hardly a flippant question. It has vexed liberals for more than half a century. Writing from 1958, in her Reflections on Little Rock, Hannah Arendt thought that Brown was an act of political immaturity which would "burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve." More than one prominent black intellectual has openly challenged the assumption that Brown was a boon for black Americans. Even the famous decision itself seems more than a little racist, striking down de jure segregation because it "generates a feeling of inferiority" in blacks. It may have been 1954, but there were obvious moral and Constitutional critiques of legally enforced segregation available. The use of state power to enforce a racial caste system and to tyrannize a vulnerable minority is a self-evident violation of equality before the law, as well as a moral abomination. Given the context, Brown comes off as a rather tepid exercise in judicial psychotherapy, notwithstanding the real power of its implicit critique of white Americans.

First-time Frayster, soulgroove07, brings this question into sharp focus with his post "Blacks do not need racial harmony or white Americans:"

As someone who was bused for 8 of his 12 years in school there was no integration amongst the races outside of Football, Basketball and Track and maybe the creative arts. As an African- American what I saw was only 5-10 percent actually making an olive branch effort across racial lines. The only thing that busing taught me was that whites could be devious in their dealings with African- Americans either through school administrations or white students acting like they were God's little angels and they weren't as bright and slick as they thought they were.

So I think the Civil Rights leaders believed too much in the goodness of white Americans when they should have never allowed our children to be educated by our white enemies. White Americans believed in racial equality in theory—not in practice—and that has not changed in the 53 years since that moment. This society will never accept African- Americans as its fellow citizens.

African- Americans do not need to live, sleep, have sex or get along with the white population to live in this country. African- Americans need to be racial atheists when it comes to the white population—Justice John Roberts and the white posters' phony "colorblind" mantra notwithstanding.

I think getting away from each other would ease the racial conflicts amongst black males and white teachers and give us as African- Americans a chance to develop our infrastructure in educating our children. There is a big world and we as Black Americans should embrace other cultures, educational ideas and those whites around the world who respect us as human beings and not as problem citizens. White Americans are corrupt with privilege and dealing with them will only give you mental and physical problems.

As one would expect, there are accusations by white posters of "reverse racism" in the ensuing discussion. Another first-time Frayster, indigo, jumps in to add to the point:

Whether or not the original poster was a bit extreme, this does not negate his/her reality. Those of us who were bussed were all individuals; children of the same age, heirs to the same promise, yet we have had individual experiences. This person's experience rings true with me, and yet the white person's experience who was bused with his/her black neighbors rings true as well. As a black child growing up in "integrated" schools, I learned many lessons, reaped many benefits, and suffered many pains.

I learned what the original poster learned: that being educated by "the enemy" was, in some cases, simply putting a band-aid on a geyser; there were plenty of smiling faces from parents, but the understanding was often that you will be a "nice black" and go to school with my kids, but you will not come to my house for dinner. You get my drift. We'll put a happy face on this and act like integration is really happening, but in reality, by the time we got to high school in the '80s, most social circles were fairly well segregated, even though the college prep classes I attended were integrated.

Yet of course, the reality is that, as a child of integration, just like that white person who was also bused, I have grown up, been educated, and operated in mostly interracial/cultural circles of people. This makes me feel wonderful, but it does not erase the reality that Black people, in this country, will always need to have our own communities to return "home" to, even if only in symbolic ways. Black people from the diaspora have always had to be bilingual and bicultural, and I see that as a strength rather than a weakness.

The children of integration have a unique battle: We must remember that our "segregated" communities had a strength and love that cannot be matched, and we must work to maintain what remains of that, mostly, our family and social connections, while continuing to work with those of other races and cultures who remain open to us, and continuing to mingle and thrive in the multicultural domains in which many of us live and work. We must reach one hand backwards, towards home, which may be a homogenous community and one hand forward, toward communities of diversity. We must find and multiply love and growth in both places. It is not an easy task.

It doesn't sound like one. As a (very) white American, I've always had the nagging the suspicion that white support for integration has more to do with assuaging the conscience of white Americans than with the manifest injustices regularly visited upon black Americans. At a minimum, assigning black children to minority status in schools stocked with the racist white children of racist white parents seems a dubious favor. Is compulsory integration good for black Americans?

Hannah Arendt once asked of compulsory integration, "do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards?" The answer, back then, was clearly "yes." After fifty years of Brown, and thirty years of bussing, many of us have seen first-hand how the decision turned out. Others still experience the problems of integration and diversity as an abstract question. If you've come of age in the last fifty-three years, we'd appreciate hearing your perspective in The Fray .   GA … 5:20am PDT

Friday, July 6, 2007