These are the memories that flashed when I forced myself to think of all the places where I’ve been on the spectrum of integration, from an entirely Black school to a virtually all-white one; from a suburb famous for its integration to a 98 percent Black neighborhood; and at a law school where there were four times as many Asian American students as Black ones. At the age of eleven, I ended up in an all-white rural town for boarding school, a sacrifice my parents made to give a restless child access to elite educational circles, despite the culture shock they knew would await her. I was lonely, and it was hard, but eventually, I found loving teachers and some other misfits—a Puerto Rican girl from Queens, a pair of sisters from Hong Kong, a gangly white girl who shared my love of female-driven fantasy books like The Mists of Avalon—who helped me find my footing.
As I moved through school, then college, law school, and work, I was never again in as overwhelmingly white an institution as that early country school, but (like many Black people) I was often navigating largely white worlds. I learned to expect to be the “only” Black person in white rooms, the one who would force a new racial awareness. I know that these experiences of racial proximity and distance profoundly influenced me, for good and for bad—that I had to subtly redefine myself with each move and, more important, often wildly reevaluate what I thought of others. This is one of those truths that we Americans know without a doubt and yet like to deny: Who your neighbors, your co-workers, and your classmates are is one of the most powerful determinants of your path in life. And most white Americans spend their lives on a path set out for them by a centuries-old lie: that in the zero-sum racial competition, white spaces are the best spaces.
White people are the most segregated people in America.
That’s a different way to think about what has perennially been an issue cast with the opposite die: people of color are those who are segregated, because the white majority separates out the Black minority, excludes the Chinese, forces Indigenous Americans onto reservations, expels the Latinos. Segregation is a problem for those on the outside because what is good is reserved for those within. While that has historically been materially true, as government subsidies nurtured wealth inside white spaces and suppressed and stripped wealth outside, I wanted to investigate the damage done to all of us, including white people, by the persistence of segregation. The typical white person lives in a neighborhood that is at least 75 percent white. In today’s increasingly multiracial society, where white people value diversity but rarely live it, there are costs—financial, developmental, even physical—to continuing to segregate as we do. Marisa Novara, a Chicago housing official, put it this way: “I think as a field, we use the word segregation incorrectly. I think we tend to use it as if it’s a synonym for places that are low-income, where Black and brown people live. And we ignore all of the places that are majority white, that are exclusive enclaves, as if those are not segregated as well.”
understand the extent to which governments at every level forced Americans to live apart throughout our history. Our governments not only imposed color restrictions on where people could live and work, but also where we could shop and buy gas, watch movies, drink water, enter buildings, and walk on the sidewalk. The obsession with which America drew the color line was all-consuming and absurd. And contrary to our collective memory, segregation didn’t originate in the South; nor was it confined to the Jim Crow states. Segregation was first developed in the northern states before the Civil War. Boston had a “Nigger Hill” and “New Guinea.” Moving west: territories like Illinois and Oregon limited or barred free Black people entirely in the first half of the 1800s. In the South, white dependence on Black labor, and white need for physical control and access to Black bodies, required proximity, the opposite of segregation. The economic imperative set the terms of the racial understanding; in the South, Blacks were seen as inferior and servile but needed to be close. In the North, Black people were job competition, therefore seen as dangerous, stricken with a poverty that could be infectious.
The Reconstruction reforms after the Civil War should have ended segregation. Congress passed a broad Civil Rights Act in 1875, banning discrimination in public accommodations. During Reconstruction, many southern cities had “salt-and-pepper” integration, in which Black and white people lived in the same neighborhoods and even dined in the same restaurants. Multiracial working-class political alliances formed in North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia. As it did after Bacon’s Rebellion, though, the wealthy white power structure reacted to the threat of class solidarity by creating new rules to promote white supremacy. This time, they reasoned that everyday physical separation would be the most powerful way to ensure the allegiance of the white masses to race over class.
In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down America’s first Civil Rights Act, and the Black Codes of Jim Crow took hold, with mirrors in the North. In the words of the preeminent southern historian C. Vann Woodward, “Jim Crow laws put the authority of the state or city in the voice of the street-car conductor, the railway brakeman, the bus driver, the theater usher, and also into the voice of the hoodlum of the public parks and playgrounds. They gave free rein and the majesty of the law to mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted or deflected.” Any white person was now deputized to enforce the exclusion of Black people from white space, a terrible power that led to decades of sadistic violence against Black men, women, and children.
For the next eighty years, segregation dispossessed Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Black Americans of land and often life. No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.) U.S. government financing required home developers and landlords to put racially restrictive covenants (agreements to sell only to white people) in their housing contracts. And as we’ve already seen, the federal government supported housing segregation through redlining and other banking practices, the result of which was that the two investments that created the housing market that has been a cornerstone of building wealth in American families, the thirty-year mortgage and the federal government’s willingness to guarantee banks’ issuance of those loans, were made on a whites-only basis and under conditions of segregation.
Even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that governments could no longer enforce racial covenants in housing, the government continued to discriminate under the pretext of credit risk. Planners for the Interstate Highway System designated Black and brown areas as undesirable and either destroyed them to make way for highways or located highways in ways that separated the neighborhoods from job-rich areas. The effects of these policy decisions are no more behind us than the houses we live in. Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to Black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between Black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of Black and white homes in those communities. Richard Rothstein, author of the seminal book on segregation, Color of Law: How the Government Segregated America, reminds us that there is no such thing as “de facto” segregation that is different from de jure (or legal) segregation. All segregation is the result of public policy, past and present.
Instead of whites-only clauses in rental advertisements and color-coded maps, today’s segregation is driven by less obviously racially targeted policies. I’ve often wondered how our suburbs became so homogenous, with such similar house sizes and types. It turns out that, like so much of how we live, it was no accident: after the Supreme Court invalidated city ordinances banning Black people from buying property in white neighborhoods in 1917, over a thousand communities rushed to adopt “exclusionary zoning” laws to restrict the types of housing that most Black people could afford to buy, especially without access to subsidized mortgages (such as units in apartment buildings or two-family homes). These rules remain today, an invisible layer of exclusion laid across 75 percent of the residential map in most American cities, effectively banning working-class and many middle-income people from renting or buying there. Exclusionary zoning rules limit the number of units constructed per acre; they can outright ban apartment buildings; they can even deem that a single-family house has to be big enough to preserve a neighborhood’s “aesthetic uniformity.” The effect is that they keep land supply short, house prices high, and multifamily apartment buildings out. In 1977, the Supreme Court failed to recognize that these rules were racial bans recast in class terms, and the impact on integration—not to mention housing affordability for millions of struggling white families—has been devastating. Today, the crisis surrounding housing affordability in the United States is reaching a fever pitch: the majority of people in the one hundred largest U.S. cities are now renters, and the majority of those renters spend more than half their income on rent. Homeownership rates are falling for many Americans as costs continue to increase, construction productivity continues to decline, and incomes don’t keep pace. Nationwide, the typical home costs more than 4.2 times the typical household income; in 1970, the same ratio was 1.7. One solution many cities are investigating or implementing is an increase in the housing supply by limiting or eradicating single-family zoning. While the net effect of increasing housing supply doesn’t always lead automatically to greater affordability without additional policy changes, the lasting legacy of the racism designed into American property markets did increase costs for all Americans.
on the South Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood that is still a working middle-class community, full of teachers and other public servants who found doors open in government that were closed in the private sector. There were also lots of owners of small businesses with an ethos that they’d rather make their own way than be “last hired, first fired,” as the saying goes, in a white person’s shop. The apartment where I was born is located in a four-story brick building that my great-grandmother Flossie McGhee bought on a “land sale contract,” one of the notorious high-interest contracts whites sold to Black homebuyers lacking access to mortgages due to redlining and bank discrimination. (In the 1960s, 85 percent of Black homeowners bought on contract.) As I discuss earlier, when you bought on contract, you built no equity until the end and could be evicted and lose everything if you missed a single payment. Against all odds, Grandma Flossie kept the payments coming with money she made by combining jobs as a nanny to white families with a lucky streak with the numbers. In our neighborhood of Chatham/Avalon, as far as I can recall and Census data can confirm, there were no white people within a fifteen-block radius of us. Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in America, by design. Before the 1948 racial covenant Supreme Court decision, 80 percent of the city of Chicago carried racial covenants banning Black people from living in most neighborhoods, a percentage that was similar in other large cities around the country, including Los Angeles.
A few times a week after school, I would visit my paternal grandparents, Earl and Marcia McGhee, a Chicago police officer and Chicago public schools social worker. They lived on the other side of the “L,” in a neighborhood known as “Pill Hill” because of all the single-family houses belonging to doctors from the neighboring hospital. Over there, it was the picture of success in brick and concrete: houses with manicured lawns, single-car garages, and monogrammed awnings over the doorsteps. But it was almost all-Black, too; a few Jewish families hung on into the 1970s, but there were none on my grandparents’ block when I was a kid. It was our own American Dream, hard-won and, for many who remember its glory days, almost utopian.
I asked my grandma Marcia about what the segregated South Side was like in those days. “We had a common history, all of us: parents who came up from terror and sharecropping to…” She laughed. “To deeds and degrees. In just one generation. And nobody gave us a thing. They were always trying to take, in fact. So, you’d walk down the street and see the new car in the driveway, the kids in the yard, and everybody was happy for each other’s success, and you knew everybody’d be there for each other when you were down.”
I was in kneesocks when Earl and Marcia McGhee were hosting regular card games and Democratic Party meetings in their finished basement on Bennett Avenue in Pill Hill, but I remember it as she does. There was a feeling that although the energy of the civil rights movement had dissipated, it hadn’t completely moved on, but had settled in the fibers that connected us. Folks like my parents and grandparents had their day jobs, but they all knew that no matter what you were doing, you were also doing it at least in part for the betterment of the community.
I never knew why the South Side where I grew up was so Black, or that it hadn’t always been. In the 1950s, Chatham’s population was over 90 percent white. Ten years later, it was more than 60 percent Black. By the time I was born there, in 1980, the population had been over 90 percent African American for a decade. But when I left home in middle school for an almost entirely all-white boarding school in rural Massachusetts, I learned two things about where I came from. The first was that the thickness of my Black community—close-knit, represented in civic institutions, and economically dynamic—was rare. In Boston, Black meant poor in a way I simply had never realized. The everyday sight of Black doctors and managers (particularly native-born) was a rarity in that old-money city where Black political power had never gained a hold and where negative stereotypes of Blackness filled in the space. Second, I learned that although we knew about white people even if we didn’t live with them—they were co-workers, school administrators, and of course, every image onscreen—segregation meant that white people didn’t know much about us at all.
For all the ways that segregation is aimed at limiting the choices of people of color, it’s white people who are ultimately isolated. In a survey taken during the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, the majority of white Americans said they regularly came in contact with only “a few” African Americans, and a 2019 poll reported that 21 percent “seldom or never” interacted with any people of color at all. In 2016, three-quarters of white people reported that their social network was entirely white.
This white isolation continues amid rising racial and ethnic diversity in America, though few white people say they want it to—in fact, quite the opposite. Diversity has become a commonly accepted “good” despite its elusiveness; people seem to know that the more you interact with people who are different from you, the more commonalities you see and the less they seem like “the other.” Research repeatedly bears this out. Take, for example, a meta-analysis that examined 515 studies conducted in 38 countries from the 1940s through 2000, which encompassed responses from 250,000 people. The social psychologist Linda Tropp explained the findings of this research in 2014, when she testified before the New York City Council in a hearing about the city’s school system, the most segregated in the United States. “Approximately ninety-four percent of the cases in our analysis show a relationship such that greater contact is associated with lower prejudice.” What’s more, she said, “contact reduces our anxiety in relation to other groups and enhances our ability to empathize with other groups.”
This is the strange paradox with white attitudes toward integration: in the course of two generations and one lifetime, white public opinion went from supporting segregation to recognizing integration as a positive good. Ask most white people in the housing market, and they will say they want to live in racially integrated communities. But they don’t. Professor Maria Krysan and her colleagues from the University of Illinois looked into how people of all races think about diversity in their neighborhood housing choices. In their study, white people could even specify how much diversity they wanted: a neighborhood with about 47 percent white people. Black and Latinx people who participated in Krysan’s study also knew what level of diversity they sought: areas that are 37 percent Black and 32 percent Latinx, respectively. I find it fascinating that all three groups say that, ideally, they want to live in communities in which they do not constitute a majority. Yet researchers found that while Black and Latinx people actually search for housing in neighborhoods that match their desired levels of diversity, white people search in neighborhoods that are 68 percent white, and they end up living in areas that are 74 percent white. They say they want to be outnumbered by people of color; instead, they end up choosing places where they outnumber others three to one. Somewhere in between their stated desires and their actions is where the story of white racial hierarchy slips in—sometimes couched in the neutral-sounding terms of “good schools” or “appealing neighborhoods” or other codes for a racialized preference for homogeneity—and turns them back from their vision of an integrated life, with all its attendant benefits. It’s a story that the law wrote in the mind and on the land through generations of mandated segregation.
In another study, Professor Krysan and her colleagues showed white and Black people videos of identical neighborhoods, with actors posing as Black and white residents, and asked them to rate the neighborhoods. They found that “both the racially mixed and the all-black neighborhood were rated by whites as significantly less desirable than the all-white neighborhood. The presence of African Americans in a neighborhood resulted in a downgrading of its desirability.” The white people’s judgment wasn’t about class—they didn’t use the actors’ race as a proxy for how nice the houses were or how well the streets were maintained or what people on the block were doing outside—because all those cues remained the same in the videos. It was simply the presence of Black people that made them turn from the neighborhood. Krysan’s experiment was a video simulation, but the real-world patterns of persistent white segregation bear it out. White people are surely losing something when they end up choosing a path closer to their grandparents’ racially restricted lives than the lives they profess to want for their children.
this problem, and public policy should solve it. Because of our deliberately constructed racial wealth gap, most Black and brown families can’t afford to rent or buy in the places where white families are, and when white families bring their wealth into Black and brown neighborhoods, it more often leads to gentrification and displacement than enduring integration. The solution is more housing in more places that people can afford on the average incomes of workers of color. What gets in the way is objections about the costs—to real estate developers, to public budgets, and to existing property owners.
But what about the costs we’re already paying? Frustrated by the usual hand-wringing over the costs of reform in Chicago, Marisa Novara and her colleagues at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute decided to flip the ledger. They asked instead, what is the cost of segregation to Chicago? They analyzed quality-of-life indicators that were correlated with segregation in the one hundred biggest cities and compared them to Chicago’s, which allowed them to see how their city would benefit from not even eliminating segregation—but just from bringing it down to the not-very-good American average.
The findings are stark. Higher Black-white segregation is correlated with billions in “lost income, lost lives, and lost potential” in Chicago. The city’s segregation costs workers $4.4 billion in income, and the area’s gross domestic product $8 billion. As compared to a more integrated city, eighty-three thousand fewer Chicagoans are completing bachelor’s degrees—the majority of whom (78 percent) are white. That means a loss of approximately $90 billion in total lifetime earnings in the city. Reducing segregation to the national median would have an impact on Chicago’s notoriously high homicide rate—by an estimated 30 percent—increasing safety for everyone while lowering public costs for police, courts, and corrections facilities; raising real estate values; and preserving the income, tax revenue, and priceless human lives of the more than two hundred people each year who would be saved from a violent death. By reducing the segregation between white and Latino residents, the researchers found, Chicago could increase life expectancy for both.
Our local economies and public health statistics aren’t the only realms in which to measure the costs of segregation; the costs are environmental as well. The environmental justice movement has long established that industry and government decision makers are more likely to direct pollutants, ranging from toxic waste dumps to heavy truck traffic, into neighborhoods where people of color, especially Black people, live. This injustice has typically been understood as a life-and-death benefit of white privilege: white people can sidestep the poisoned runoff of our industrial economy. But less well known is the fact that segregation brings more pollution for white people, too. It turns out that integrated communities are less polluted than segregated ones. It’s a classic racial divide-and-conquer, collective action problem: the separateness of the population leaves communities less able to band together to demand less pollution in the first place, for everyone. An environmental health scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, Rachel Morello-Frosch, conducted a major study examining pollutants that are known carcinogens and found that more segregated cities had more of them in the air. As she explained it to me, “In those segregated cities, white folks are much worse off than their white counterparts who live in less segregated cities, in terms of pollution burden.”
I marveled at the force of the finding: segregated cities have higher cancer-causing pollutants—for white people, too—than more integrated ones. Professor Morello-Frosch was quick to add: “And it’s not explained by poverty….That effect remains even after you’ve taken into account the relative concentrations of poverty.”
talk about ‘good schools’ and ‘good neighborhoods’ makes it clear that the absence of people of color is, in large part, what defines our schools and neighborhoods as good,” writes Robin DiAngelo. This old belief—which few white families would consciously endorse today—remains undeniably persistent as long as all public schools aren’t “good schools.” So, why aren’t they? This thorny but solvable problem is rooted in our country’s centuries-old decisions to segregate communities as well as decisions we continue to make today about how we draw our school districts and how we fund public schools.
Although the federal government kicks in a small portion, schools are financed primarily by local and state taxes, so the wealth of the community you live in will determine how well resourced your local schools are. White communities tend to draw their district boundaries narrowly, in order to make ultra-local and racially and socioeconomically homogenous districts, enabling them to hoard the wealth that comes from local property taxes. Meanwhile, areas with lower property values serve greater numbers of children of color with fewer resources. Nationwide, overwhelmingly white public school districts have $23 billion more in funding than overwhelmingly of-color districts, resulting in an average of $2,226 more funding per student. If we recall how much of white wealth is owed to racist housing subsidies, the decision to keep allowing local property taxes to determine the fate of our children becomes even less defensible.
Of course, even these all-white, high-income public school districts are rare, as most white parents know. Increasingly, public education has been hollowed out by the way that racism drains the pool in America: public goods are seen as worthy of investment only so long as the public is seen as good. Today, the majority of public school students in the United States are children of color. Why? Because a disproportionate number of white students are enrolled in private schools, comprising 69 percent of K–12 private school enrollment. The boom in private schools, particularly in the South and West, occurred as a reaction to school integration in the 1950s and ’60s. Unsurprisingly given so many private schools’ advent as “segregation academies,” today, almost half of private school kids attend schools that are essentially all white.
The pricing up and privatization of public goods has a cost for us all—most white families included. A house in a neighborhood unencumbered by the systemic racism found in public schools serving children of color will cost significantly more. In the suburbs of Cincinnati, a house near a highly rated school cost 58 percent more per square foot than a nearby house with the same one-story design and high ceilings, just in a different school district. The national picture is consistent, according to the real estate data firm ATTOM Data, which looked at 4,435 zip codes and found that homes in zip codes that had at least one elementary school with higher-than-average test scores were 77 percent more expensive than houses in areas without. Paying a 77 percent premium may be fine for white families with plenty of disposable income and job flexibility, but it’s a tax levied by racism that not everyone can afford. That’s why so many families feel like they’re in an arms race, fleeing what racism has wrought on public education, with the average person being priced out of the competition. ATTOM Data calculated that someone with average wages could not afford to live in 65 percent of the zip codes with highly rated elementary schools. (CNN covered that study with a blunt headline that would be surprising to few people: You Probably Can’t Afford to Live Near Good Schools.) Families who can afford a house near a “good” school, in turn, get set up for a windfall of unearned cash: a 2016 report found that homeowners in zip codes with “good” schools “have gained $51,000 more in home value since purchase than homeowners in zips without ‘good’ schools.”
In order to chase these so-called good schools, white families must be able and willing to stretch their budgets to live in increasingly expensive, and segregated, communities. This is a tangible cost both of systemic racism and of often unconscious interpersonal racism: fear itself. These white parents are paying for their fear because they’re assuming that white-dominant schools are worth the cost to their white children; essentially, that segregated schools are best.
the entire logic is wrong? What if they’re not only paying too high a cost for segregation, but they’re also mistaken about the benefit? Here’s where things get interesting. Compared to students at predominantly white schools, white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores, particularly in areas such as math and science. Why? Of course, white students at racially diverse schools develop more cultural competency—the ability to collaborate and feel at ease with people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds—than students who attend segregated schools. But their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.
The dividends to diversity in education pay out over a lifetime. Cultural competency is a necessity in today’s multicultural professional world, and U.S. corporations spend about eight billion dollars a year on diversity training to boost it among their workforce. In the long run, research reveals that racially diverse K–12 schools can produce better citizens—white students who feel a greater sense of civic engagement, who are more likely to consider friends and colleagues from different races as part of “us” rather than “them,” who will be more at ease in the multicolor future of America in which white people will no longer be the majority. The benefits of diversity are not zero-sum gains for white people at the expense of their classmates of color, either. Amherst College psychology professor Dr. Deborah Son Holoien cites several studies of college students—the largest of which included more than seventy-seven thousand undergraduates—in which racially and ethnically diverse educational experiences resulted in improvements in critical thinking and learning outcomes, and in the acquisition of intellectual, scientific, and professional skills. The results were similar for Black, white, Asian American, and Latinx students.
All this untapped potential. All these perverse incentives pulling us apart, two generations after segregation’s supposed end. I felt compelled to look again at the 1954 Supreme Court decision that should have changed everything, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Brown struck down state and local laws that racially segregated public schools and rejected the premise of “separate but equal,” which had been the law of the land since the Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The NAACP (and, later, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund) had been litigating against segregation since the 1930s, focusing less on why segregation was wrong and more on the government’s failure to guarantee “equal” or even sufficient facilities, resources, and salaries at Black colleges and public schools. It was a strategy to ratchet up the public cost of state segregation.
But in the end, what led to a historic unanimous decision from the Supreme Court was disapproval not of inequality but of separateness itself. In Brown, the civil rights lawyers employed the expertise of social scientists to argue that it was segregation and the message it sent, which reinforced the notion of human hierarchy, that hurt children more than mere out-of-date books and unheated classrooms ever could. Thirty-two experts submitted an appendix to the appellants’ briefs detailing the damage of segregation to the development of “minority” children. The facts in this appendix were the indelible details—most memorably the Black children learning to prefer white dolls—that formed the moral basis for the Court’s decision in Brown. And Brown gave rise to a progeny of cases over the following decades, cases protecting brown and Black children from the sting of inferiority, an inferiority signaled by being excluded from white schools.
But there was another path from Brown, one not taken, with profound consequences for our understanding of segregation’s harms. The nine white male justices ignored a part of the social scientists’ appendix that also described in prescient detail the harm segregation inflicts on “majority” children. White children “who learn the prejudices of our society,” wrote the social scientists, were “being taught to gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive way.” They were “not required to evaluate themselves in terms of the more basic standards of actual personal ability and achievement.” What’s more, they “often develop patterns of guilt feelings, rationalizations and other mechanisms which they must use in an attempt to protect themselves from recognizing the essential injustice of their unrealistic fears and hatreds of minority groups.” The best research of the day concluded that “confusion, conflict, moral cynicism, and disrespect for authority may arise in [white] children as a consequence of being taught the moral, religious and democratic principles of justice and fair play by the same persons and institutions who seem to be acting in a prejudiced and discriminatory manner.”
As Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, reminded us on the sixty-second anniversary of the decision, this profound insight—that segregation sends distorting messages not just to Black and brown but also to white children—was lost in the triumphalism of Brown. She wrote, “I believe that we must have a public reckoning with the history of the full record presented to the Court in Brown, which predicted with devastating clarity the mind-warping harm of segregation on white children.” The now-lost rationale for why segregation must fall—the rationale that included the costs to us all—might have actually uprooted segregation in America. After all, arguing that Black and brown children suffered from not being with white children affirmed the reality of unequal conditions, but once the argument was divorced from the context of legal segregation, it also subtly reaffirmed the logic of white supremacy. Today, it’s that logic that endures—that white segregated schools are better and that everyone, even white children, should endeavor to be in them.
It’s a bit of a platitude that children don’t see race, that they must learn to hate. It’s in fact the subject of one of the most popular tweets of all time, from Barack Obama, who captioned a photo of himself looking into a window at the faces of four children: two white, one Asian, and one black: “No one is born hating a person because of the color of their skin or his background or his religion.” But I think about my own childhood, which was filled with judgments, conflicts, and alliances around race, memories from as early as nursery school. The truth is, children do learn to categorize, and rank, people by race while they are still toddlers. By age three or four, white children and children of color have absorbed the message that white is better, and both are likely to select white playmates if given a choice. While still in elementary school, white children begin to learn the unspoken rules of our segregated society, and they will no longer say aloud to a researcher who asks them to distribute new toys that “these kids should get them because they’re white.” Instead, they’ll come up with an explanation: “These [white] kids should get the new toys because they work harder.”
For all my efforts to enumerate the costs of segregation, the loss is incalculable. “The most profound message of racial segregation for whites may be that there is no real loss in the absence of people of color from our lives,” wrote Robin DiAngelo. “Not one person who loved me, guided me, or taught me ever conveyed that there was loss to me in segregation; that I would lose anything by not having people of color in my life.”
me to families who are discovering the Solidarity Dividend in integration. Because the dominant narrative about school quality is color blind—the conversation is about numerical test scores and teacher-student ratios, not race or culture, of course—it’s easy to walk right into a trap set for us by racism. It’s an easy walk for millions of white parents who don’t consider themselves racist. It was even an easy walk for Ali Takata, a mother of two who doesn’t even consider herself white.
“Full disclosure I’m fifty percent white,” she wrote in an introductory email. “I’m Hapa—Japanese and Italian. My husband is Sri Lankan, born in Singapore and raised in Singapore and England. Even though we are a mixed Asian family,” she freely acknowledged, “I’ve approached public school as a privileged [half-white] person. Depending on the situation, I am white-passing, although it’s always hard to know how people perceive me.”
Ali and her family moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Austin, Texas, so her husband could begin a new job at the University of Texas. Ali researched the area, using school-rating resources such as GreatSchools.org to find what she then considered “a good neighborhood and a good school” for their two daughters, who were in preschool and first grade, respectively.
“Austin is divided east and west,” Ali said. “And the farther west you go, the wealthier and the whiter the city becomes. The farther east you go, the more impoverished and browner and blacker the people are.” This was no accident, she explained. “The 1928 Austin city plan segregated the city, forcing the Black residents east. Then Interstate Thirty-five was built as a barrier to subjugate the Black and brown residents even further. So…historically I-35 was the divide between east and west.”
Ali’s family could have paid less for a home in East Austin, where the school ratings were lower, but instead, they found a house in what she described as “a white, wealthy neighborhood” on the west side of Austin. Ali herself had grown up in a similar community, in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. As someone who is part white and part Asian, she had never felt totally comfortable there. But everything was nudging her to choose a similar world for her kids: the social conditioning, the data, even the signals that our market-based society sends about higher-priced things simply being better.
So, the Austin neighborhood Ali chose in order to find a “good” school ended up being very much like suburban Connecticut in the 1980s. “I recall specifically feeling like something was wrong with my eyes,” said Ali. “Where were the Asian people? And where were the Black people? They were virtually invisible here….And it was just because I live on the west side.”
She sent her kids to the local public school, whose student body reflected the neighborhood. “I will say that the first year was great,” Ali said. “I found the people very welcoming….It took me about a year to find a niche at that school, among the white wealthy people. But I did, you know. And I called them friends.”
And yet, certain aspects of the school’s culture began to disturb her. Parents were deeply involved in the school—not only fundraising and volunteering, but intruding into the school day in ways that seemed to Ali like “helicopter parenting.” Parents tried to “micromanage the teachers and curriculum,” Ali saw, to “insert themselves into the inner workings of the school, and to assume that ‘I know just as much or more than the teacher or administrator.’ ”
It slowly dawned on her that many of the behaviors of both students and parents that she found off-putting were expressions of white privilege. “I feel like there’s a way in which we upper-middle-class parents…want [our kids] to be unencumbered in their lives,” including, she feels, by rules. “It’s this entitlement. And it’s this feeling of…is there a rule? I don’t need to respect this rule. It doesn’t pertain to me.”
By her children’s third year in the school, Ali realized, “ ‘I just can’t do this. This is not me.’ It just—I felt kind of disgusted by the culture.” It was everywhere, and yet she didn’t have a name for it until she became involved in an affinity group for parents choosing integrated schools. “The competitiveness, complete with humble bragging. The insularity and superficiality, the focus on ‘me and my kid only,’ ” Ali said. “By staying at [that] school, I was supporting a white supremacy institution. That felt so wrong.” Yet virtually her entire social circle in Austin was composed of parents who were active in the school and immersed in its values.
She began to research alternatives, visiting eight public schools on Austin’s East Side, where her daughters would not be “surrounded by all that privilege,” Ali said. “I was going to make this decision to desegregate my kids. You know, if the city wasn’t going to do it, there’s no policy around it, then I was going to do it.
“It was a very lonely process. I didn’t talk to anybody about it except for my husband.” The next fall, Ali and her husband transferred their daughters, then in second and fourth grade, to a school that was 50 percent African American, 30 percent Latinx, 11 percent white, 3 percent Asian, and 5 percent students of two or more races. Eighty-seven percent of the students were economically disadvantaged.
Ali’s daughters are mixed Asian, with features and skin tones that make it unlikely they will be perceived by others as white, the way Ali sometimes is. At their old school or the new one, she said, “My girls will always go to school with kids who look different from them.” Still, “I did not want to raise my girls in such a homogenous, unrealistic community….I wanted them to experience difference.”
The new school, she said, is predominantly “Black and brown, and that is what…permeates the school. There’s music playing right when you walk in. Fun music, hip-hop music. And there’s a step team.” Ali values that her children will not grow up ignorant of the culture of their peers on the other side of town, but the advantages of the new school go much deeper than music and dance. “It’s also more community-focused, which is antithetical to the white, privileged culture” of making sure my child gets the best of everything.
As for the parents in the West Austin neighborhood, “there has been a deafening silence around my decision.” When she runs into some of her former friends, they may talk about how their children are doing, but they don’t ask her anything at all about hers. “The white community I left felt stifling and oppressive,” Ali said. “That part surprised me. My profound relief surprised me. I had no idea that living my values would feel so liberating.”
Transferring to a new school in which they are surrounded by kids with different experiences and frames of reference has had its bumps, but it “has been an eye-opening experience for [my girls], I think,” Ali said. “And it has brought up really healthy [family] discussions…about wealth and class and how it feels for them…to be called [out] for being the rich kids….I think it’s been an amazing experience.”
Integrated Schools is a nationwide grassroots effort to empower, educate, and organize parents who are white and/or privileged like Ali, parents who want to shift their priorities about their children’s education away from centering metrics like test scores or assumptions about behavior and discipline and toward contributing to an antiracist public educational system. The movement acknowledges that “white parents have been the key barrier to the advancement of school integration and education equity.” Through resources including reading lists and guides for awkward conversations along with traditional community organizing and coalition building tactics, the movement encourages parents not to view “diversity primarily as a commodity for the benefit of our own children” and not to view schools that serve primarily students of color as “broken and in need of white parents to fix them.” Rather, the goal of leveraging parents’ choices about schools should be to disrupt segregation because of the ways it distorts our democracy and corrodes the prospects of all our children. The group offers tools and tips to enable parents to live their values and to raise antiracist children who can help build an antiracist future.
As for Ali Takata, she lost a circle of friends but gained something far more valuable. “Through my experience at the new school, I’ve been able to see how steeped in white upper-middle-class culture I had been,” she said. And now, “Oh my goodness, I cannot believe the peace I feel with my decision and my life.”
children to the local public schools twenty-something years ago wasn’t so much a decision for Tracy Wright-Mauer, a white woman who moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, when her husband got a job at IBM. It was more of a decision not to act, not to pull her children away from the urban neighborhood she fell in love with, with its beautiful old homes. “My husband and I, we didn’t consciously say, ‘Okay. We’re going to…be, you know, be the integrators,’ or anything. We just didn’t think not to buy a house in the district, and we didn’t think, ‘Oh, well, I’ll send my kids to private school [because] the school doesn’t look like my kids.’ ” The most thought she ever gave to it was when other white parents would ask her questions such as “Well, when you get to middle school, are you going to send them to private school?” or “What about high school? You’re going to send them to Lourdes, right?” referring the nearly 90 percent white Catholic school.
Many of these white parents had purchased their houses in Spackenkill, a wealthy part of Poughkeepsie that fought for school district independence in the 1960s and ’70s. Spackenkill successfully sued to keep its district separate from the larger city, walling off its richer tax base (including the revenues from the IBM headquarters). One can find similar stories all across the country, with predominantly white school districts drawing narrower boundaries to serve far fewer children (typically just fifteen hundred) than majority of-color low-income districts that serve an average of over ten thousand. It’s a hoarding of resources by white families who wouldn’t have such a wealth advantage if it weren’t for generations of explicit racial exclusion and predation in the housing market.
A few years ago, Tracy was cleaning her house and came across her daughter’s second-grade class photo: fifteen smiling prepubescent boys and girls in their Photo Day best. She snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook, and one of her Black friends pointed out to her that “other than the teachers, [Fiona] was the only white kid in the class.” Her daughter, Fiona, is now in college; her son, Aidan, is wrapping up high school. They’re both the products of what parents in the Integrated Schools Facebook group Tracy now belongs to call “Global Majority” public schools, and “both have learned to discuss race,” she offered. “They talk about it all the time. They discuss class. They discuss racism and equity, and they just are really, really engaged with their friends about these subjects. And, you know, I think it’s pretty awesome.”
I had to ask Tracy the million-dollar question: Were they good schools? What about the standardized test scores, the yardstick by which all quality is measured? Tracy didn’t pause: “Maybe I’m an anomaly. I think other parents look to the test scores…to judge a school. Just because the test scores are not, you know, the highest in the state, or in the top ten, it doesn’t mean to me that the kids aren’t getting really great teachers and being challenged and doing interesting things in their classes.” Her son, Aidan, who was graduating the year we spoke, is the only white guy in his friend group, and all his friends were going on to college. “His friends are smart kids who work hard, and they do well on their SATs, and they’re very motivated.”
I was able to reach Fiona, a freshman on a rowing scholarship at Drexel University in Philadelphia, in her dorm room. I asked her what it had been like going to a high school where just 10 percent of the student body was white. Fiona recalled it making for some uncomfortable conversations with white kids in other school districts. They’d go something like this: “I’d say, oh, I’m from Poughkeepsie [High],’ and they’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ Which someone actually said to me.” I cringed. “It’s really just disappointing. Because I love Poughkeepsie [High], and I loved my time there, and the friends I made.”
Fiona said her direction in life had been influenced by how she learned to see the world at Poughkeepsie High; she credited the experience with giving her the skills to be an advocate. “It helped me empathetically. I don’t know if I want to be a politician, or if I want to work with some environmental justice organization, but empathy has a lot to do with that: looking at both sides of the story and not trying to put a Band-Aid over something, but getting to the root of the problem. I think that’s where my skills lie. And…a lot of that comes from where I grew up and where I went to school.”
Fiona’s now at a college where more than half of the students are white, and just 8 and 6 percent are African American and Latinx, respectively. It’s a big shift. Many of her white peers are just not as comfortable around people of color. “If there’s a roomful of Black people and [we walk in and] we’re the only white people? I think they sort of say—like, ‘Oh, like, let’s leave.’ Or they say, like, if we’re out at night, ‘Oh, this is, like, a little sketchy.’ Things like that, I notice.” But she also doesn’t want to suggest that white kids who grew up in segregated schools are hopeless when it comes to race. “I think one of the downfalls of growing up in a homogeneous setting is that the process of understanding…racial inequalities and recognizing one’s own privilege can be very uncomfortable and might take longer, but it doesn’t mean they don’t get there.”
In that way, Fiona feels lucky. “I got to spend my time with people who didn’t look like me, and that didn’t really matter. And I hope to strive to feel that way throughout my whole life. To not be surprised when I’m in a diverse group of people, and just be like, ‘This is normal. This is how it’s supposed to be.’ ”