Decompiling Oppression #4
Sam McVeety
This week, we're going to talk about a perennially hot topic: school segregation, integration, and community control. This subject is rich and complex, and we'll touch on additional dimensions of redlining, school choice, etc. in the future. Not having any kids myself, I experience the personal aspects of this topic at a distance: through discussions with families and friends, as well as my own background as the child of a private school teacher and as someone who attended that same institution.
Let's start with the context that most of us have. In dominant narratives, Brown v. Board of Education is heralded as the end (or at least the beginning of the end, modulo massive resistance) to segregation in public schools. Over the next 50 years, though, many of the same injustices that fed in to Brown would repeat themselves in different guises, up to and through the present.
When looking back at Brown, it's important to understand that the civil rights movement itself wasn't monolithic, and the conversation around school desegregation featured two competing ideologies -- integrationism vs. community control. Essentially, integrationism is based on the idea that by creating integrated spaces, we create equal access. Conversely, community control holds that communities must have the power and autonomy to shape institutions like the education system. (For a deeper treatment of these topics, I recommend Gary Peller's Race Consciousness.)
Critics of integrationism highlight the fact that even when integration provides basic access to institutions, if those institutions remain unchanged, students of color are deprived of their full right to an education. In practice, this played out across the South in post-Brown public schools in the staff and administration, which remained white, regardless of the integration of the student body. Adding insult to injury, many staff and administrators color found themselves out of a job, rather than sharing control of newly integrated schools. We still see this dynamic playing out today, here in Seattle, where teachers are overwhelmingly white (though some change is happening).
Proponents of community control advocated for those same staff and administrators of color to be able to keep their jobs (and keep open institutions that primarily served students of color), and identified the primary goal of the movement to be providing sufficient resources to communities of color to educate their children. Unfortunately, community control is often dismissed as hypocritical or "reverse discrimination" (a topic we'll likely revisit in weeks), when in fact it is tied to a critical analysis of power and resources that are required for institutions to succeed and flourish. Integrationism defers the hard questions about resource distribution by conveniently colocating white students and students of color, assuming that they will then benefit equally in the future. It essentially says, "it's a pity that your schools are bad -- here, we'll let you attend ours", but never directly address root causes (wealth inequality, voter suppression, etc.) of why there are severe disparities in the first place.
By assuming the primacy of existing (white) institutions, integrationism also lacks a critical curiosity about the needs of the students of color whom it is attempting to integrate. By placing them in (often hostile) white-dominated institutions, it can both isolate them and simultaneously pathologize their need for community within those contexts (e.g. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?). This is something that institutions have been slow to respond to well beyond the educational sector, lacking the vocabulary to describe this need beyond a usual default of "color-blind" policy.
In many ways, the proponents of community control were prescient in their anticipation of the modern de-facto re-segregation that occurs in many school systems. This is playing out in high-profile examinations of Seattle's Highly Capable Cohort, and its disproportionately white composition. There are two major factors worth mentioning here: (1) the very notion that such a cohort could end up with such a composition (and attendant implication of inferiority of others) without some kind of bias merits extreme skepticism (2) the concentration of resources around this cohort mirrors the same historical frustrations around community control. The first factor speaks for itself. As for the second, I think it brings up one of the fundamental questions around education policy -- what do we choose to advocate for and when, and whom does it benefit?
There's so much more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now. I recognize that education is a deeply personal and complex topic, and I'm sure that many of you share my passion for creating the best system we can. My invitations to you for this week:
Personal: When you think about the educational causes that you are passionate about, think about what communities are (empirically) able to access those resources. If there are disparities, what barriers might be preventing broader access?
Communal: If you are a parent, or friends with one, take some time to collectively reflect on how to advocate for resources to reach all children, particularly those who are historically underserved.
Solidarity: Look up the information for your local school board meeting, and identify an issue that is important to promoting equity in education. Attend a meeting and make a public comment about it, or if you're unable to attend, find another way to show your support.
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