The question before the Supreme Court seemed simple enough: to prevent
segregated schooling and its harms, can districts use race as a factor
when assigning students to schools? Lawyers for white parents filed lawsuits
arguing that using race in school assignment plans is discriminatory, unfair
to white people. Attorneys for the districts being sued argued that—given
patterns of residential segregation and the fact that whites tend to choose
schools that are disproportionately white—race has to be considered to
prevent schools from becoming “all white” and “all minority.”
This summer, the Supreme Court gave us an answer. Well, actually, they
gave us a 185-page set of convoluted answers. On the one hand, the Court
found the school assignment plans unconstitutional, saying they unfairly
targeted individual white students. Four members of the Court declared
that schools should never be used to combat de facto segregation.
On the other hand, a majority of justices concluded that maintaining “diversity”
in schools is a compelling interest, but urged us to explore “race-neutral”
options to integrate our schools before we can consider race itself. It’s
a directive akin to constructing a lung cancer prevention program without
targeting smoking in the first place.
Today’s Supreme Court, flush with new right-wing appointees, has ushered
in an era when the national imperative to fight racism shall no longer
be the explicit business of our schools. If fighting racism means considering
race—and requiring white people to be an explicit part of the solution—well,
forget it. That’s just too much to ask.
Never mind the findings of a brief submitted to the Court by hundreds of
the nation’s leading researchers, documenting severe racial inequalities
in our nation’s schools.
Never mind that one-sixth of our nation’s black children attend “apartheid
schools”—schools that are plagued by poverty, limited resources, social
strife, and health problems.
Never mind that segregated minority schools have more teachers without
credentials who teach subjects in which they are not certified, more instability
caused by rapid turnover of both students and faculty, more limited academic
curriculum, and more exposure to crime and violence in the school’s neighborhood.
Never mind that students in these schools tend to perform less well on
achievement tests and are less likely to graduate from high school.
Never mind researchers’ conclusion that school integration is a necessary
equalizer. Instead, today’s Supreme Court has issued a directive toward
a new era of state-sanctioned segregation, insisting that we cloak our
conversations about racial disparities within the sentiments of “diversity.”
We can create school assignment plans designed to achieve “diversity,”
so long as that diversity isn’t constructed on racial lines alone. To examine
race and racism explicitly is to be “unfair” to white people.
Never mind that it’s not most white students who are floundering in our
public schools. Indeed, the federal No Child Left Behind policy uses white
students’ performance as the benchmark to judge youths from all other racial
and ethnic groups. By those measures, white students are doing exceptionally
well.
Never mind that the point of school integration was never some “miraculous
cure” of skin-to-skin contact between the races, but instead to ensure
that children of color had access to the financial and social assets bound
up in white middle-class children.
Never mind that, of all the programs implemented in the Civil Rights era
to help unfasten white supremacy, school integration was the only one that
consistently impacted the lives of millions of white people on a personal
level. It was white people’s only assignment requiring personal action.
Never mind.
Today’s Court instead instructs our nation to be mindful of white people’s
comforts, discouraging conversations about whiteness and power, whiteness
and privilege. We are told to adopt “race-neutral,” “color-blind” methods
of treating the national disease of racism. It’s a racial version of “don’t
ask, don’t tell.”
Yet, as long as race still counts in the U.S., we must scream and yell
and raise almighty hell. As the social science brief submitted to the Court
showed so clearly, race still counts in U.S. education. At the dawn of
the 21st century, a sweeping five-year study concluded that race determines
success elsewhere, in everything from job opportunities to housing.
Treating the national disease of racism means that we must be color-conscious,
not color-blind, and we must come to understand that white supremacy lives
not just behind the masks of Klanspeople, but also beneath the robes of
Supreme Court justices.
Z
Jennifer Holladay is a civil rights advocate living in Denver.
