Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (18 page)

From Baltimore, Maryland, to Los Angeles, California, Black and Latino students are demanding AP and honors classes, clean bathrooms, up-to-code buildings, books, universal access to a college preparatory curriculum, teachers who hold high expectations of them, and more. Even as these youth engage in struggles for equal educational opportunity, for quality education as a civil right, an ideological discourse holds sway in the public domain that blames these students, their peer groups, their parents, and their communities for their underperformance in school.

In the midst of shameful educational inequities and against the backdrop of a public discourse that foregrounds progress and accountability while inequality of educational resources remains unaddressed; in the midst of a reemergence of theories of cultural deficiency as an explanation for school failure while a new generation of youth struggles for a right to quality education; can we re-envision public schools as the great equalizer? What conversations do we need to have about race, education, and democracy in order for this view of schools to take hold? What do we need to know about our present, about the past, about how race historically undermined and continues to undermine the necessary link between education, citizenship, and the possibility of a robust democracy?

In the spring of 2006, Simmons College and Beacon Press, two distinguished Boston institutions, entered into a collaborative relationship and launched the Simmons College/Beacon Press Race, Education, and Democracy lecture and book series. We wanted to provide a public location for ordinary citizens, individuals from many walks of life and from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, to begin to have the conversations necessary to rearticulate a vision of public schools as a common good, as the great equalizer, and of quality education as a civil right. And we wanted these lectures to have a life beyond their occurrences, one that would be captured in short, accessible, general-interest books that could inspire further reflection, dialogue, and action.

In pursuit of these goals, each year, the Simmons College/ Beacon Press series will select a prominent scholar to deliver four or five public lectures on the topic of race, education, and democracy. We are gratified that Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, the ninth president of Spelman College and the author of the highly acclaimed book
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” And Other Conversations about Race
agreed to give the inaugural lectures in the series. While we knew that members of the general public were deeply interested in the issue of race and its impact on education, the public’s response to the 2006 lecture series, to both the topic and to Dr. Tatum, was overwhelming, with more than seven hundred individuals attending the lectures. And the audience was as diverse as we imagined, with attendees representing the rich racial and ethnic diversity that characterizes the Boston area and including high school students, graduate students, community and religious leaders, policymakers, activists, teachers and principals, elected officials, school board members, college professors, and retirees.

This book is based on those public lectures. In it Dr. Tatum opens exactly the kind of conversation we need so urgently to have about education, race, and the American community. She asks us, in particular, to talk about race in an era of the resegregation of public schools, and her range of topics throughout the book shows the complexity of the terrain—from issues of identity and achievement to the possibilities of cross-racial friendship to the responsibilities of higher education. She asks us to understand how race and decisions informed by racial understandings have contributed to the resegregation of the schools. In a hopeful stance, she lays out throughout the book what we can do in these segregated environments to prepare students of color and White students to live and work in our multiracial, multicultural democracy. And among many other things, she profiles the promising practices of individual educators and public school systems in these challenging times.

We are pleased to present this book as the first in the Simmons College/Beacon Press Race, Education, and Democracy series. It is our hope that it challenges its readers to talk about race in more complicated ways. It is our hope that this book will help individuals reclaim Horace Mann’s vision of schools as the great equalizer and spur us on to commit ourselves to make sure that our educational institutions—public schools, colleges, and universities—become laboratories for a democracy predicated on difference, laboratories for a multiracial, multicultural democracy. Can we talk about race, education, and democracy?

THERESA PERRY
is a professor in the departments of Africana Studies and Education at Simmons College and director of the Simmons College/Beacon Press Race, Education, and Democracy lecture and book series. She is coauthor, with Asa Hilliard III and Claude Steele, of
Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African-American Students;
coeditor, with Lisa Delpit, of
The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children;
editor of
Teaching Malcolm X;
and coeditor of
Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in the Multicultural Classroom
.

Although the essays presented here are based on four lectures given at Simmons College in the spring of 2006, they represent many conversations held with students and colleagues over a number of years. I have been privileged to spend a lifetime with brilliant students, and many years with dedicated educators who are committed to antiracist classroom practices, and I have learned a great deal from the examples they shared and the questions they asked. I thank them all.

This collection would not have been possible without the invitation of Dr. Theresa Perry of Simmons College and the encouragement and helpful editing of Andy Hrycyna of Beacon Press. It is hard to fit the production of a book into the schedule of a college president and I often wondered if it was possible. But as I worked on the book it became very clear to me that it was important to find the time.

Many projects begin, but no project ends, without the love and support of my husband, Travis Tatum, carrying me through. He reads every word as many times as I need, and he always has something helpful to say. I am truly blessed. To my parents, Robert and Catherine Daniel, I know you are pleased but not surprised. Thank you for your unending support and encouragement. To Travis, Jonathan, David, and Shanesha, thank you for your patience at Thanksgiving as I pressed toward my deadline. I know you will carry the torch for the next generation.

At Spelman College we have a compelling mission to develop the intellectual, ethical, and leadership potential of our students. Spelman seeks to empower the total person, who appreciates the many cultures of the world and commits to positive social change.

I find inspiration in that mission every day. As we celebrate 125 years of educating women who change the world, I want to thank the Spelman College community for allowing me to serve as their leader during this important time in the life of the college.

When Coretta Scott King received her honorary degree from Spelman in 1984, she left us with these words:

I acknowledge this responsibility, and I thank Mrs. King for the clarity of her charge.

1
. The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was approved by Michigan voters in the November 2006 election.

2
. See Linda Darling-Hammond, “The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research, Policy, and Practice for Democratic Education,”
Educational Researcher
25, no. 6 (1996), 5–17.

3
. See Harry G. Lefever,
Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957–1967
(Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005), 27–30.

4
. Beverly Daniel Tatum,
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”; and Other Conversations about Race
(New York: Basic Books, 1997).

5
. For an expanded discussion of racial and ethnic categories, see Chapters 1 and 8 in Tatum,
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”

6
. See John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, eds.,
School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

7
. For a summary of the educational history of Native Americans and Asian Americans in the United States, see Joel Spring,
Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States
, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997). For a discussion of the experiences of more recent Asian immigrants, see Stacey J. Lee,
Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2005).

8
. Thomas Friedman,
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

1
. Charles Clotfelter,
After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 16–17.

2
. Ibid., 14.

3
. Ibid., 19.

4
. Joel H. Spring,
Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States
, 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw- Hill, 2001).

5
.
Brown v. Board of Education II
, 349 U.S. 294 (1955), italics mine.

6
. Charles J. Ogletree Jr.,
All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education
(New York: Norton, 2004), 10.

7
. See Peter Irons,
Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision
(New York: Viking, 2002).

8
. Ibid., 204.

9
. Clotfelter,
After Brown
, 26–27.

10
. F.A. Holloway, “What Is Affirmative Action?” in
Affirmative Action in Perspective
, ed. Fletcher A. Blanchard and Faye A. Crosby (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989), 9–19; Dalmas Taylor, “Affirmative Action and Presidential Executive Orders,” in
Affirmative Action in Perspective
, ed. Blanchard and Crosby, 21–29.

11
. Faye J. Crosby, “Understanding Affirmative Action,”
Basic and Applied Social Psychology
15, nos. 1 and 2 (April 1994), 13–41.

12
. For an expanded discussion of affirmative action, see Beverly Daniel Tatum,
“Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”; and Other Conversations about Race
, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 114–28.

13
. See Clotfelter,
After Brown
, 188.

14
. For a discussion of W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of the talented tenth and the double consciousness of African Americans, see his classic text,
The Souls of Black Folk
, originally published in 1903 (New York: Signet Books, 1969).

15
. William E. Cross Jr.,
Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American identity
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

16
. Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation,
Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education
(New York: New Press, 1996).

17
. As cited in Clotfelter,
After Brown
, 30–31.

18
.
Milliken v. Bradley
, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

19
. Irons,
Jim Crow’s Children
, 257.

20
.
Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell
, 498 U.S. 237 (1991).

21
. Irons,
Jim Crow’s Children
, 259–71.

22
. Ibid., 271.

23
. John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, eds.,
School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 3.

24
. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program, July 1, 2004. The census now allows respondents to identify more than one racial group. The data are reported in terms of “single race” as well as “one race in combination with one or more races.” I have used the percentages for “single race” in this summary.

25
. John Logan et al.,
Ethnic Diversity Grows, Neighborhood Integration Lags Behind
(Albany, N.Y.: Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, April 2001),
http://mumford.albany.edu/census/WholePop/WPreport/page1.9780807032831_epub_c01_r1.html
.

26
. Thomas W. Sanchez, Rich Stolz, and Jacinta S. Ma,
Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities
(Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University; Washington, D.C.: Center for Community Change, 2003).