“We must learn to live together as bothers or perish together as fools”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Forty years have passed since Thurgood Marshall successfully argued before the Supreme Court schools which were separate, however equal, were inherently unequal. In the wake of the now famous Brown v The Topeka Board of Education case, communities across the nation embarked on a revolutionary program to integrate the nations schools, a few voluntarily … most under some form of economic or legal duress.
Liberals politicians, progressive social engineers, civil rights activists, and the millions of Americans who believed segregation was immoral sought a color blind society where universal tolerance would replace the nation’s heritage of discrimination and intolerance. They strategy was grounded on the logical assumption that if peoples of different races grew up and were educated together, the institutional biases which infected prior generations would soon dissipate.
As in our society at large, there can be no argument, significant strides have been made in breaking down the barriers of racial prejudice in America’s public schools. Still, Martin Luther King’s dream of a nation in which people are judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin remains elusive.
The depth of the problem became tragically apparent during a recent Frontline expose on California’s Berkeley High. Even in what has been a hotbed of liberal thought and progressive educational thought, race and ethnicity remain enormous obstacles to harmonious and integrated educational environment.
Yet, while we should be alarmed, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this latent racism. As far back as the 1960s, when the courts were first mandating forced busing as a means of desegregating public schools, a fledgling crusade emerged on our “left” coast which began to undermine the goals of integration as surely as did “white flight”. This movement has since evolved into is now known as ethno-centricism … a politically correct justification for the resegregation of society.
Its advocates, in their zeal to counter what they view as the low self-esteem, sub-par academic performance and a lack of motivation of some elements of society have developed a rich core of programs which frequently paint all those who are not “people of color” as racist oppressors. In the name of allegedly preserving the cultural heritages of African-Americans, Indigenous-Americans Hispanic-Americans, Latinos, Chicanos and Asian-Americans, many such agendas preach isolation, foster inherently racist beliefs and provide justifications for rejecting or ignoring mainstream curriculums. Aside from being incorrectly revisionist in content, they advocate separatist doctrines and tend to be exclusionary, rarely recruiting or attracting students outside the culture being taught.
Meantime, the educational establishment has contributed to the problem. Chief among its sins has been mindless implementation of tracking, or segregating students on the basis of perceived ability. Such programs frequently contribute to self-fulfilling expectations of student performance. As a result few but those in honors classes are truly challenged by an academically disciplined environment. Unfortunately, tracking frequently exacerbates in-school segregation by typically placing wealthier, better-prepared suburban students, overwhelmingly white and Asian, in the accelerated, advanced-placement classes … while relegating generally less affluent, urban students, more often than not people of color, in the less demanding courses.
In reality, our nation may never have been the melting pot of cultures for which it has been given credit. A more apt metaphor might be an American quilt, in which each square represents different cultures, ethnic groups, races or religious heritages. Each adds to the beauty of the whole while remaining unique and undiluted in their individuality. Race and ethnicity should do no less in our nation’s schools.
When the football game is on the line, the math team is competing in a state competition, the band is playing or the curtain on the school play is ready to go up, no asks or even cares about the skin color of the ball carrier, student solving the calculus problem, drummer or stagehand drawing the curtain. Yet, pathetically, when students sit in their classroom, congregate in the corridors, eat in the cafeteria or simply mill around outside their school buildings, they most often do so along racial and ethnic lines.
Still, the picture isn’t all bleak. There are some student as well as many educators, cutting across racial and ethnic lines, who are speaking up against racist attitudes from all sources and insisting on demanding academic standards in math, the written and verbal use of English and other disciplines. Many are also pleading with their fellow students to recognize the reality they are Americans living in America. They understand that their peers who choose to deny those realities, discard an education as irrelevant and refuse to accept those reasonable societal norms will condemn themselves to a life-long, uphill battle for survival once they leave school and have to make it on their own in this country.
However glamorous the rhetoric of their firebrand solemates might sound, most students buying into separatists ideologies, save a few recent immigrants, would find themselves totally dislocated and exposed to the ravages of societies far less tolerant of contrarian behaviors than in America, were they to suddenly be transported to Africa, China or even Mexico.
So long as the myths that mainstream education is unimportant and integration is a form of white supremacy are perpetuated, the next generation of Americans will remain as distant from and untrusting of one another as was the case a century ago. A frustrated, former flower-child of the 1960s, now a mother of a 1990’s teenager lamented, “we can’t even figure out how to get our children to eat lunch together.”
