- Originally published in ColorLines Magazine Summer 2004
Fifty years ago, Brown v. Board of Education was one of the linchpins
of a social revolution that ended Jim Crow. In many ways it was more
successful at ending segregation in public life than it was in changing
our schools. What is Brown's relevance for the next decade?
By the time this article is read the commemoration of the 50th
anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board
of Education will be well underway. Last year the academic press began
the process of commemorating Brown with a number articles in education
journals, law reviews and academic conferences. Most commentators will,
of course, celebrate one of this country's most important cases and
lament that the vision of Brown to end segregated schooling in America
remains unfulfilled. These two versions of Brown, as moral compass and
unfulfilled promise, are both accurate. Seldom has the Supreme Court
issued an opinion with such profound implications for the direction of
our country, and seldom has a court order been so persistently evaded
by a combination of determined opposition and eroding judicial support.
While over these 50 years Brown has been critiqued from as many
different directions as the geometric facets of a snowflake, today it
remains a cornerstone of our legal culture, but one whose relevance for
the next decade is in serious doubt.
From a purely legal standpoint Brown was remarkably sparse on the law.
The entire decision is only a few pages long and even the principle
litigants were shocked at the brevity of the opinion. But in its brief
discussion, the Court issued a decree that resonates in the memory of
most of us who came of age in the 1950s and '60s. It declared that in
the field of public education "separate but equal has no place."
However, in that simple majestic command lies one of Browns greatest
ironies. The year 1954 will forever mark the beginning of the end of
the legal structure of American apartheid known as "Jim Crow." Although
the decision was directed only at public education, it soon became the
precedent for the legal assault on segregation in other areas of public
life. In many ways Brown was far more successful in ending segregation
in those arenas than it was in changing our public schools. With the
civil rights movement at its peak, federal judges began applying Browns
reasoning far beyond public education, and Congress finally responded
in 1965 with the passage of the most comprehensive civil rights act in
nearly 100 years. A social revolution had been unleashed, and Brown was
one of its linchpins.
A Story of Unredeemed Promise
It's not surprising that, despite Browns order to the district courts
to end segregation in our schools, resistance to the new order was
tenacious, ingenious and often violent. In fact, Browns 20th, 30th and
40th anniversaries have each served as benchmarks and bitter reminders
of just how stubborn the resistance to school integration has been.
While opposition was expected in the South and resulted in the Supreme
Court modifying its decision in Brown II with the language for
desegregation to proceed only with "all deliberate speed," by the time
the Court shifted its attention from South to North the reaction was
often just as resolute. Whether the opponents rallied under the banner
of "preserving neighborhood schools" or maintaining "quality education"
or "parental choice," the results were the same. Whites were reluctant
to go to school with blacks and would back up that opposition with
lawsuits, legislative proposals, foot dragging of every sort by the
courts, and as a last resort, fleeing integrated school districts for
the predominantly white suburbs.
Gary Orfield and John T. Yun at the Harvard Center for Civil Rights
have tracked this retrograde in school desegregation efforts and
revealed a troubling state of affairs. Their studies show that today,
more than 70 percent of the nation's black students now attend
predominantly minority schools. Another dramatic and largely ignored
effect of resegregation has been on Latino students. In 1968 only a
little more than 20 percent of Latino students were enrolled in
intensely segregated schools. In 1998 approximately 75.6 percent of
Latino students attended predominantly minority schools. This
resegregation is occurring at a time when our nation's public school
system as a whole has never been more diverse. While whites make up
only 60 percent of the children in the nation's public schools, except
in the South and Southwest, most white students have little contact
with students of color. As metropolitan school districts have become
overwhelmingly black and brown, they are now surrounded by suburban
schools that are overwhelmingly white, according to Orfield and Yun's
study "Brown: Dream or Nightmare." Today the Court has declared that
segregation that is not the direct result of intentional conduct by
public officials is beyond the reach of the Brown mandate. This means
that discrimination in housing, employment, home insurance, bank
redlining, allocation of transportation funds, all of which have
created this modern phenomenon known as the urban ghetto, will not
affect the court's narrow view of what constitutes unlawful school
segregation.
However, the often tortuous story of Browns unredeemed promise is not
only a tale of judicial retreat and white flight. One of Browns most
controversial findings was from the testimony of Dr. Kenneth Clark and
his now infamous "doll study." Dr. Clark used a color preference
experiment using black and white dolls to demonstrate that segregated
schools had a harmful psychological impact on black students. His
study, while based on other social science data that supported his
premise, revealed that black children showed a preference for dolls
with white features. Unfortunately, one of the controversies of his
study was that black children in northern "integrated" schools showed a
slightly higher preference for this color disassociation than children
in segregated southern schools. The Court seized on his testimony and
issued another of its most memorable phrases, declaring that "to
separate them [black children] from others of similar age and
qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of
inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their
hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone (emphasis added)."
That phrase has been cited by black critics of Brown as the epitome of
liberal paternalism and the reason that the burdens of most school
integration efforts have been thrust on their shoulders. The
implication drawn from this language was that black children were
suffering from some form of social maladjustment. Whether it was
"caused" by segregation is beside the point. This notion of blacks as
"victims" in need of association with whites as the necessary remedy to
truly "make them equal" invokes racist images of the alleged civilizing
influence of the white over the African that is as old as slavery
itself. Oblivious to any paternalist implications, the Supreme Court
used this idea that black children were being harmed by segregation,
and harmed more severely by imposed legal segregation, as a central
rationale for abandoning the "separate but equal" doctrine. Despite the
flaws in the Clark study, it was clear even 50 years ago that the
institutional racism of forced segregated schooling was harming a lot
more than the self-esteem of black students.
So, where does that leave Brown and the legal mandate to achieve
equality through the integration of our public schools? It is precisely
this question that remains unresolved today.
Segregation and Inequality
If equality was linked to the desegregation of our schools in 1954, do
we have equality today in this era of resegregation? For many this
question has shifted the debate from integration to "equality of
educational opportunity" and an effort to measure the distribution of
educational resources rather than a distribution of students. While
standardized testing has revealed an achievement gap between inner city
and predominantly white suburban schools, the causes for the
educational under-performance of non-white children, particularly in
this era of resegregation, is less clear. At least one study, from
Educational Trust, has found that "by the end of the fourth grade,
African American, Latino and low income students are already two years
behind grade level...by the time they reach the twelfth grade they are
four years behind." More recent research has for obvious reasons
focused on whether integrated schools really do in fact provide "equal
educational opportunity." If it can be shown that there is a link
between integration and academic performance (equal opportunity), then
it supports the basic thesis of Brown, This research would also assuage
anxious white parents who might be more willing to participate in an
experiment in school integration as long as the quality of their own
child's education would not be compromised. Black parents who
understandably want no part of a missionary effort might be convinced
that integration is really worth fighting for if there really is a
strong correlation between integration and educational quality.
Unfortunately, while there certainly are good arguments for integrated
public schools beyond formal equality, especially in this age of
globalization, the data supporting a clear link between integration and
academic performance is inconclusive despite nearly 25 years of studies.
Brown focused only on the integration of our schools, but the next
evolution of Brown must reach beyond one institution and recognize the
broader realities of structural racism that plague the education of
children of color. Structural racism is racism underneath and across
society, permeating its entire history, culture and institutions. Our
culture, including our education, perpetuates, normalizes and
legitimates the effects of racism, while making them invisible to the
narrow legal definition of unlawful segregation. New studies offer a
clear example of this through the connection between the health and the
education of children of color.
A Public Health Crisis
While Dr. Kenneth Clark's efforts in the Brown case focused on the
always difficult to prove issue of psychological harm, recent research
has taken a different direction as it looks at the physical harm that
institutional racism creates. These new studies have begun to explore
the relationship between race, class, poverty and stress from a public
health perspective. The next link in this chain just might be how
educational achievement is affected by the stress of discrimination.
While much more research needs to be done before these studies reach a
clear conclusion, their preliminary findings point toward a public
health rationale for school desegregation efforts.
In Browns aftermath, our metropolitan school districts have not only
remained segregated, they have also become concentrations of urban
poverty. Today almost 29 percent of blacks live below the federal
poverty threshold and 33 percent live in neighborhoods of concentrated
poverty. Latino students on average attend schools where 44 percent of
the students are poor. We have known for some time that poor
neighborhoods often correlate with substandard schooling. For example,
schools with predominately students of color are on average twice as
large as white schools, have a 15 percent larger class size, maintain a
lower quality and remedial curriculum and attract less qualified
teachers, according to Orfield and Yun. In this mix of school data, we
now have recent studies showing that these same neighborhoods also have
an alarming increase in chronic health problems. In a recent New York
Times article, researchers revealed that in many poor urban
(black/brown) communities, even young people are becoming afflicted
with chronic diseases and dying at rates similar to those of a Third
World country. Asthma rates alone are at an epidemic level.
While initial reactions linked these results to the well-known
disparity in health care between the rich and poor, that view failed to
explain all the varieties of deteriorating health that were occurring
in poor urban communities. Although some scientists still hold to the
deprivation of services explanation, others now believe that we have
created a combination of social and environmental conditions in poor
communities as stark as if a line had been drawn around them. On one
side of the line are middle class residents with the normal societal
distribution of illnesses. But on the other are the poor with a
dramatic prevalence of heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney
failure, diabetes and other illnesses that seem to be tied in some way
to increased prolonged exposure to stress. While school-age children
have not been isolated in this population for separate study, we do
know that many of their illnesses that manifest later in life have
their origins in childhood or even at birth. Added to these reports on
concentrated poverty and health are other studies that point toward
institutional racism creating this harm, including its impact on
school-age children.
Racial discrimination or racist events in the lives of African
Americans have now been isolated as a special debilitating health
factor. Reports have begun to measure the impact of racism as a
specific stress factor that impacts physical as well as emotional
health. This phenomenon called stress is not simply how we feel or
react to events. While our affect is a part of the picture, there is
also a clear biochemical reaction to stress. When we experience
stresses on an occasional basis, there is generally no corresponding
negative health impact. But when we are subjected to prolonged exposure
to stress, we literally begin to wear our bodies down. While this is
true of all of life's stresses, this new research has pinpointed racist
events, such as discrimination, as especially debilitating. The
prolonged, grinding daily impact of institutional racism as a special
form of stress may now be a major factor explaining this dramatic
deterioration in the health of people of color, according to authors
David Williams, Michael Spencer, and James Jackson in their study
"Race, Stress and Physical Health." While the Supreme Court might not
recognize these events as proof of discrimination in a narrow legal
sense, our biochemistry reacts to the stress of discrimination and
creates long-term deleterious effects.
What remains to be determined is whether the unmistakable pattern of
institutional racism experienced by children of color in our ghetto
school districts can be linked to the host of illnesses they are
beginning to manifest even at an early age. If it can, then the new
quest for equal educational opportunity may be based on the right of
our children to be free from the institutional racism of imposed
educational isolation.
So what does this mean for the future of Brown? While Dr. Clark began
with a focus on issues of self-image in black children 50 years ago, we
now know that there is a clear relationship between race, poverty and
poorly performing inner-city school districts well beyond the
psychological factors. We are beginning to understand that those very
same communities also suffer numerous forms of stress, especially the
now documented stress from institutional racism that created these
closed zones of poverty. This is structural racism, not formal legal
discrimination but racism across institutions. And we now better
understand the link between that form of racism and the clear
measurable physical harm that it causes. In 1954 we called that harm
the denial of equal protection under the law. At Brown's next
anniversary the struggle for equality just might be targeted at
educational racism, our national public health crisis.
Copyright 2004 Applied Research Center. ColorLines Magazine
ColorLines