style="font-size:15px;"> Yet, even as the White resistance/deserved segregation framework offers essential insights into the macrohistorical conditions that have fueled a retreat from school integration and advanced the growth of suburban school resegregation in the United States, it remains limited as an explanatory model for a number of reasons. One reason is that it fails, in broad terms, to adequately account for the importance of (often hard-fought) “on-the-ground” efforts to develop and institute integration plans at the district and school levels, and how the trajectory of such activities can play a significant role in determining citizens’, parents’, and educators’ attitudes about the viability and desirability of shared schooling. In other words, macro-level accounts tend not to include qualitative and comparative attention to the relative challenges of instituting integration on a school-by-school basis as it relates to curricular and pedagogical development and efforts to facilitate relational cultures and strong partnerships between educators, parents, and school administrators to assure commitment and accountability to educational models that can successfully engage student across racial, class, and linguistic difference (see, for example, strategies highlighted in Warren 2005 and Warren, Mapp, and the Community Organizing School Reform Project 2011).
Another limitation of the dominant White resistance/deserved segregation explanatory framework is that, by privileging processes of White racism and entitlement claims, it tends to obscure the various ways in which historically oppressed racial minority populations have responded to such treatment, denying them any agency outside of victim. Due to this largely unidirectional historical lens, a deep consideration of what school desegregation initiatives have historically expected of racial minority populations has too often been overlooked. As well, little analytical space is given to an exploration of the ways in which racial minority populations may be internally differentiated by various forms of racial, class, and gender-based discrimination, and the consequences of such differentiation on political agency and engagement at local, regional, and national levels (Gilroy 1987; Gregory 1998). Put another way, the explanatory approach, taken alone, fails in broad terms to adequately account for what school desegregation efforts have required of minority groups, and how such expectations have generated conflicts and spawned political subjectivities that have shaped the very terrain on which integration politics, and equity-based school reform debates more broadly, have taken place at local, regional, and national levels.
Normative Whiteness and the Limits of the Integrationist Project Set Forth in Brown
While the White resistance/deserved segregation framework emphasizes the resistance of privileged White citizens to the vision, expectations, and implications of the mandates set forth in Brown v. Board of Education, the fact is that significant voices of critique have also come from within the very minority communities that the Brown ruling was intended to vindicate. These voices of resistance go back to the period before and during the original Brown proceedings when, for example, Black Nationalist leaders spoke strongly against the court’s vision for school integration based on what they regarded as the incomplete understanding of racism and race relations on which the decision was based, and the limited view of racial domination and racial justice that it appeared to reflect (Peller 1996). Because the Brown agenda was framed primarily as a struggle against pathological or psychological manifestations of racist attitudes or behaviors, the court assumed that overcoming prejudice and arriving at racial justice could best be achieved through the social practice of equal treatment. Such a practice would require the establishment of a color-blind position, or a sort of race neutrality within public schools, in which all students would have access to an objectively defined, racially integrated form of “quality education” based on neutral standards of professionalism and universal testing paradigms that could serve as effective and appropriate measures of schooling equality and individual ability (Peller 1996: 131).
What Black Nationalist leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael found problematic about this particular framing of the integrationist project was the manner in which it diverted attention away from how race and class backgrounds and experiences have structured socioeconomic, political, and educational opportunities over time, eluding consideration of how racism has operated within a historical context related to centuries of unequal distribution of social, economic, and political opportunities and through normative practices that have served to produce systematic White privilege. Viewing racism as primarily a “problem of psychology” evaded not only issues of class exploitation and struggle but also trivialized and mystified the deeper sources of racial inequality that have never been located solely, or even primarily, in individual actions or prejudices but in a racialized social order sustained through enduring systems of hierarchically organized racial inequality that include de facto occupational, residential, and school segregation (Omi and Winant 1994: 133; see also Lipsitz 1998).12
The Black Nationalist critique of the Brown agenda was not a rejection of integration per se, but a rejection of the particular assimilationist terms under which that integration was expected to take place. Brown promoted a form of integration that was assimilative in nature, based on the dominant paradigm of citizenship and belonging in the United States, which asks all citizens regardless of race, class, or cultural background and experience to assimilate to “American culture” by conforming to normative cultural and linguistic practices, and to concede the use of nonstandard or native linguistic and cultural practices in the public realm. Against the Brown court’s idea that the absence of race consciousness in schools would allow fair, impersonal criteria to inform merit-based decision making and assure “quality education,” the Black Nationalist perspective “characterized the norms that constituted the neutral, impersonal, a-racial, and professional character of school integration as particular cultural assumptions of a specific economic class of Whites” (Peller 1996: 140). In doing so, they sought to deny the very possibility and feasibility of an “ideal,” objective, neutral, and skills-oriented “quality education”; instead, they meant to demystify it as the arbitrary establishment of middle-class, Anglo-American cultural practices and cultural capital as the preferred and rewarded norms of behavior, learning, and interaction within schools (see also Heath 1996; Kelley 1997).13 What was considered dangerous about an approach to desegregated schooling that dismissed as irrelevant—or, at worst, inferior—the cultural and linguistic resources, skills, and experiences of the non-White, non-middle class, was the manner in which it could serve to promote the supposition that cultural deficits explain low achievement, an assumption that was used to justify lowered expectations for working-class racial and ethnic minority students and to encourage disparagement of racial minority group status in ways that have promoted student disengagement from normative educational models (see Foley 1997; McDermott 1997; Valenzuela 1999). The fears articulated by Black Nationalist leaders were that assimilative integration, in practice, would serve as a “subterfuge for White supremacy” (Peller 1996: 139) in which “successfully” desegregated environments would become settings for resegregation due to tracking practices, ability grouping, and expectation of Anglo conformity for equal access, participation, and respect in important schooling activities.
Dangers of White Normativity in Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Schooling Contexts
Unfortunately, these early concerns about the dangers of assimilative integration have, to a large degree, been realized in public schools in the United States up to the present day. An expansive body of ethnographic literature has been exploring the negative forms and consequences of White normativity in U.S. public schools, including attention to how discourse and practices of “color-blindness” can lead to subtle forms of discrimination and privilege that aid in the production of unequal schooling experiences and outcomes (Kailin 1999; Lewis 2003); how Whiteness can come to function as a status associated with giftedness and privileged entitlement, disproportionally channeling educational resources to White students (Fine 1991; Staiger 2004); and how everyday racialization processes in educational settings can impact student identifications and social affiliations in ways consequential to school success (Bettie 2003; Chesler, Peet, and Sevig 2003; Davidson 1996; Hurd 2008; Olsen 1997; Perry 2002).
This
