"There is no such thing as racial integration. There is and only can be, the existence of Racism, or the non-existence of Racism. Racism either exists, or it does not exist." [theCode]
Nearly six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled "separate but equal" education intrinsically unequal, American schools remain deeply racially segregated, and approaches to fixing the problem have not kept pace with the changing dynamics of segregatation.
That was the crux of the argument last night by Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the American Education Research Association's 10th-annual Brown lecture in education research (named for the seminal civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education).
Orfield, an education, law, and political science research professor, traced the intertwined histories of education, jobs, and housing initiatives of the Brown era that have not yet closed racial gaps: nearly two out of five black and Latino students attend deeply segregated schools, and schools with on average twice the poverty concentration of the schools of white and Asian students.