F. What Color Are the Emporer’s New Clothes?

The Ghosts of Jim Crow
inequality.education.let’s review.
Monday, July 23, 2007 ektLocalizeDate(‘2007-07-23′,’ID0ED’)
By William Jelani Cobb

Six years into the George W. Bush era, it seemed apparent that this administration would be defined by a series of phrases that add up to a kind of shameful shorthand: Abu Graib, warrantless wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay, No Child Left Behind, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Half of those words would be enough to damn a presidency but at least “segregation” wasn’t one of them. Until now.

The recent Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of race as a factor in school assignments is a product of Bush’s new appointments to the court. It is also a huge step toward reincarnating the ghosts of Jim Crow. Chief Justice John Roberts employed the tortured logic that “the only way to move past race is to move past race.” This is the equivalent of saying that the only way to prevent a boulder from rolling downhill is to stop pushing it.

Amid the heated half-truths and semi-analysis of the case, most media outlets failed to mention that the school districts in Seattle and Louisville weighed race as only one factor among several when they assigned students to schools. And both those districts had the goal of diversifying the student populations at their schools. The omission of that fact made it easy for people to believe that the decision to get rid of “race-based school assignments” was consistent with the spirit of desegregation as opposed to a clever means of reinstituting it.

The tragic irony here is that a lot of African Americans may not fully recognize the implications of this decision for years to come. Stop by any barbershop, barbeque or church basement in Black America and you will hear – with distressing frequency – that old canard that “integration” ruined the Black community. In the years since the Brown decision, our discussions of Jim Crow have come to feature all sorts of sepia-toned references to that era when Blacks “owned our own businesses, and lived in a sort of color-coordinated nirvana. Not surprisingly, a number of Black parents’ groups joined in the lawsuit to end the diversity programs in Seattle and Louisville. And last year, a Black city councilman in Oklahoma went so far as to call for the creation of all-Black school districts.

That kind of nostalgia stems from a basic misunderstanding of Brown v. Board of Education and the reasons why Black activists began demanding educational “integration” in the first place. Fifty-three years ago when Thurgood Marshall and the team of lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued the Brown v. Board of Education case, their primary goal was to end the vast disparity between what states spent on educating White children versus the pittance they allowed for Black education. After years of court battles in which they fought to have equal funding given to Black schools it became clear that the only way to prevent Black children from being economically shortchanged was to literally place them in a classroom next to White kids. Integration was not an ideal; it was a grim reckoning that states would continue to discriminate against Black students, and all-Black schools simply made it easier for them to do so.

The word “diversity” has largely replaced “integration” in our political vocabulary, but as the spending gap between urban and suburban schools attests, there is still a huge economic issue confronting Black education. The truth is that many school districts are more segregated now than they were 40 years ago. Without the ability to recognize the legacy of race even the modest progress that has been made will ultimately be undone.

But the most alarming aspect of this decision may not even be directly related to education. This decision is the opening move in the new conservative axis of the Supreme Court. The Brown decision held that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment – an amendment specifically crafted in 1868 to protect the rights of newly emancipated Black people. Shortly after it was ratified that amendment was essentially gutted by a series of reactionary Supreme Court decisions. Brown was the first in a series of Fourteenth Amendment victories that dealt with everything from voting rights and workplace discrimination to interracial marriage and criminal justice. If history is any guide, a whole array of hard-earned rights and protections will be jeopardized by this decision – and those that come after it.

The high court has blithely chosen to push this country toward a kind of false color-blindness. The wise among us know the truth: that racial discrimination in America has a nearly 200 year head start on the most basic efforts to eradicate it, that racism has a momentum all its own and “moving past race” requires that we be willing to first confront it. And we know that most bitter truth is that the boulder is picking up speed.

(William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, ‘To The Break Of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic’ was published earlier this year by New York University Press. )

He can be reached at http://www.jelanicobb.com