CuteAndCritical

Color Blind Politics

Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle District No.1 (2007)

The post-Civil Rights era (1964-present day) has largely been characterized by its commitment to “color-blindness”. Color-blindness can be understood as a race neutral politic that rejects taking racial difference into account in decision making. In the Obama-era, there’s a false sense of dystopia that somehow the U.S. has overcome the race problem with various pieces of progressive legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

However, the process of disregard towards existing protective statutes coupled with the creation of new color-blind laws and policies continues to set the U.S. backwards in a quest to end racism in housing and schooling (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). This issue is epitomized by Supreme Court case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle District No.1 (2007) where a race conscious school district policy that was implemented to achieve racial balance in school was cast as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The implications for the school district is that all students are competing for the same spots in the district’s best schools with disregard to a history of segregation that Black students have historically faced. Thus, a ruling of the sort exemplifies a commitment to color blind politics that disadvantage Black students and privilege White students because they often have more resources to be competitive (see: racial wealth gap). 

Preserving White Communities 

Milliken v. Bradley (1974) 

Milliken was a case in Michigan where parents who were outraged by the segregation occurring in proximity to cities undergoing busing and other desegregation orders, parents sued. The parents were unsuccessful and the suburban school districts were not held to the same desegregation orders that cities were.

Critical whiteness studies professor, George Lipsitz, provides a framework for understanding the justification of Milliken. According to Lipsitz (2006), “contemporary Whiteness and its rewards have been created and re-created by policies...even after the outlawing of de jure segregation in the 1960s.” De facto segregation rewarded White socially mobile people to re-create all- White suburbs that were free from the desegregation court orders. 

The End of Jim Crow

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Jim Crow came to a halting stop in 1954 when Thurgood Marshall and his team of lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund were successful in proving that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional. The landmark Brown decision would mark the beginning of a transformed society. However, critical race theorist and father, Derrick Bell (1980) would publish his seminal work providing an alternative framework for understanding the court’s decision.

Bell posits the “Interest Convergence Dilemma”, which is the theory that the only time Black Americans experience progress is when the interests of Blacks are aligned with the interests of Whites. The three specific interests that converged in the Brown decision were:  

 1)  Black World War II veterans (i.e. Paul Robeson) spoke up about the fighting for a country that segregated them upon arrival home; 

2)  U.S. government worries that implementing democracy in rising communist countries would be viewed as illegitimate if segregation persisted; and 

3)  The realization of Southern Whites that there was the opportunity to transition from an agrarian society to an industrialized one (Bell, 1980).

In line with the framework, interest convergence matters because it reveals the way in which Black Americans’ political enfranchisement is at the mercy of White governmental interests.

Vocational schooling track for Black Americans.

Cooley High School, Chicago, 1975.

Cooley High School was a vocational high school in Chicago, IL made famous for its debut in 1965 movie, “Cooley High” as a Black American high school coming of age story. Vocational schooling has been a viable career path for millions of Americans resulting in increased wages and job security, throughout the 20th century it was a site of great divide between the country’s poor and elite. According to Jim Stone, Director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. “Kids from poor families were tracked off into becoming the worker bees. Others were tracked off to go to universities and be the intelligentsia. We would today call that tracking” (Hanford, 2014).

Statistics (Urban Institute, 2017) tell us that Black Americans have history been disproportionately a part of what’s classified as “poor”. To add on to Stone’s assertion that vocational schools were created for the poor, they were also created to segregate Whites from Blacks. Even in poverty, Whites were segregated from Blacks as a way of preparing them for future segregation in their respective manufacturing workplaces. 

The Federal Government’s Improper Discretion

President FDR’s New Deal

The Great Depression of the early 1930s revealed the gross inequities that had existed in the United States. President Frederick D. Roosevelt’s New Deal has gone down in history as one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in U.S. history. Millions of Americans were able to recover from the market crash thanks to his substantial assistance to help the working class (among others) back on their feet.

However, as critical race theory frameworks would inform us--even with progressive policy, Black people were excluded in material ways. Rothstein’s (2017) book, Color of Law, about segregation in schooling and housing informs us that the industries that were excluded from the New Deal funds, inclusive of significant reforms such as increased minimum wages, didn’t apply to sectors that Black Americans were disproportionately working in such as agriculture and domestic service largely due to Roosevelt’s political compromise with Southern Democrats to retain their support. As recounted by critical frameworks, we must problematize the notion that progressive policy can be the way forward to eradicate racism.  

Sites of Resistance 

Black Boarding Schools

Black people haven’t always attended traditional schools. in fact, prior to the Brown decision in 1954, there were hundreds of Black boarding school. Vast eradication of these schools occurred when Black teachers and students were able to integrate traditional public schools.

Piney Woods School in Mississippi, one of the nation’s oldest Black boarding high schools, is known for promoting student achievement. The findings of a 2016 psychosocial study of the students at Piney Woods imply that:

A culturally relevant boarding high school setting could positively impact perceptions of student readiness; and that the development of non-cognitive psychosocial factors can positively impact students’ persistence to attain their individualized postsecondary educational goals (Cockerham & Toms, 2016, p. 2).

Critical race theorist Ladson-Billings’ (1995) model of culturally relevant teaching proves to be an appropriate framework for Black student success that pre-dates the coining of the term itself in the mid- 1990s. Although the scholarship on Black boarding schools is limited, what we do know is that the models have supported Black students in ways that are similar to Black higher education.

White Flight

Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956 which began the massive expansion in interstate highways across the nation. Today, the average American may not give much thought to why the creation of highways was transformational. Among providing quicker ways to travel between cities and managing the growth of migration to urban metropolises, their construction also meant destroying undesirable neighborhoods that were largely occupied by Black people (Rothstein, 2017). 

Conversely, facilitating “White flight” was equally as important as destroying dilapidated communities that Black people were segregated into. Post-World War II, the federal government backed loans to support returning (White) veterans with buying a home in the suburbs. The exclusion of Black veterans was consequential because when White people left cities, resources followed. Thus, schooling in the suburbs was largely White and schooling in the cities was for everyone else who wasn’t provided the government-funded opportunity for social mobility--namely, Black people. 

Ignoring Precedent

Buchanan v. Warley (1917)

In public discourse there is a misconception that de jure (by law) segregation was not declared unconstitutional until the reformative years of Civil Rights laws of the 1950’s and 60’s— specifically the Brown decision. However, this is not the case. Segregation by race was decided by both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and upheld by Supreme Court case Buchanan v. Warley (1917). In Buchanan, a White man, Buchanan sold a house to a Black man, Warley on a block that was 80% White in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time, Louisville had a city ordinance that prevented the sale due to the racial composition of the area. Buchanan sued Warley for non- completion of the sale. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Buchanan citing that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, “[assured] to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights...enjoyed by white persons”. 

So then why the need for subsequent litigation? The simple answer is the Taney court disregarded the precedent of Buchanan in Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy would go on to create the standard that Brown later declared unconstitutional: “separate but equal”.