Epilogue
What Now?
The desire for desegregated schools was about two goals: teaching children of different races how to live together and ensuring that black students had access to the same resources as white students. School desegregation was part of the path to achieving Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community,” an ideal manifestation of the inter-relatedness of all human beings regardless of the color of their skin, their faith, their gender or their wealth—a community of love and a community of justice.
Court-ordered desegregation actually moved us closer to that vision, according to research on school integration during the 1970s and ’80s (12). In spite of this, the political will was not sustainable, and white parents found ways to resist by moving or sending their children to private schools and by voting judges out of office. Court orders were eventually almost all reversed. In the absence of laws to mandate desegregation, schools are once again highly segregated, with more than 70 percent of black students going to majority non-white schools and nearly 40 percent of black students going to hyper-segregated schools. Those students pay the price in lower school achievement and employment prospects (13).
Without court-ordered mandates, entrenched racial housing segregation continues to drive school segregation. Housing segregation is itself driven by a long history of racist policies—redlining and unfair mortgage loan practices, for example—that are not likely to change quickly. Court-ordered school desegregation did not work, and it will never be retried. There is no political will for such unpopular policy.
In the absence of courageous national leadership, creating the beloved community will require community solutions. But the communities surrounding hyper-segregated schools face multiple challenges with few resources. School districts need dialogue between and across communities and racial lines.
What if each school district were asked to come up with a plan for making the beloved community a reality, and what if funding became dependent on achieving that goal? This scenario sounds dreamy, but school systems spend a lot of money trying to fix what is wrong in an already broken system. What if they start with a vision of what they want?
Local decision-making for schools requires community-driven processes to figure out how to make racial equity work across a school district or state. It requires many people talking to one another to understand what their individual and mutual needs are. Community-based participation is not an easy process. It takes a long time, and it is frustrating to many people, because during the conversation it seems as if nothing is happening. The process makes funders and administrators nervous because it requires different metrics for success than are usually used; the process is difficult to manage and hard to evaluate in the short term. It takes political will and financial support to make community-driven solutions to racial equity in schools work. Stakeholders (parents, teachers, school administrators) who are not motivated to seek racial equity for its own sake will require convincing that racial inequities have costs for everyone (14).
Dramatic demographic changes in the South since we were in school in the 1960s and ’70s will bring even more complexity to the task of locally driven solutions. The racial composition of schools is no longer primarily black and white; Latino children now comprise nearly the same proportion of students as black children do. In 1970 in the South, 67 percent of students were white; 27 percent were black; 6 percent were Latino, and less than 1 percent were Asian. In 2014, these proportions had shifted to 43 percent white, 27 percent Latino, 24 percent black and 3 percent Asian. Working toward racial diversity and equity within school systems where there are substantial percentages of white, black and Latino students will require that those participating in the efforts pay attention to multiple cultural understandings and requirements. (15)
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There are no quick fixes, no silver bullets. There will be different solutions for different communities. Progress may mean greater racial integration, or it may not. Though we are talking about the need for non-white students to have access to all educational opportunities that white students have access to, we still want to consider the importance of keeping some safe spaces for minority students. Some students will benefit by having teachers of the same race who better understand their cultural context and who can challenge them without sending them out into the deep waters before they are ready. The resources at their schools must be equal to those at schools with majority white students, however.
Finding ways to achieve racial equity in public schools, as well as in all other institutions in our country, requires that people—black, brown, and white—find a way to talk to one another about the reality of race in their lives. Over the course of the writing of this book, our focus has been working together to find our truths about the role of race in our school lives. It was through our conversations that our most valuable insights occurred.
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There are so many people NOT talking about race even as their beliefs about race direct their actions; they are uncomfortable talking about it, they do not know how to talk about it, and they need role models and safe spaces. Unfortunately not talking about race leads to more feelings of discomfort and distrust of people with whom we share no stories, no laughs, and no insights into each other’s lives.
We, LaHoma and Cindy, ask you, the readers of this book, to think with us about the value of public school integration even in the absence of court-ordered mandates. We are not advocating the desegregation of our resegregated schools as scholars, or politicians, but rather as two people, one black, one white, who lived through, survived, thrived in, and reaped value from an experience that transformed our lives. We are people who came to understand the importance of creating a fair and inclusive society, one that benefits from equal and just access for all of its members.
Our hope is that our stories will encourage you to think about your own stories related to race, stories that have shaped what you believe or how you live your lives today. We hope that you will share these thoughts with others. And if you have friends of other races, we hope that you will share your stories with them, and listen to theirs, and together, begin a conversation. Through this dialogue, we hope you gain a greater understanding of how each of you feels about being a member of your own race. We hope you begin to understand the perspectives of people from races other than your own, and to see why something may seem threatening racially when it may not be about race at all. We hope that from these conversations, you can find your shared concerns, and that rather than putting up barriers, you will find a way to talk through the discomfort, face down your fears and find hope for the beloved community—together.