Education as Destiny: Cementing Blacks as the Problem
This system of separate and unequal schooling of Black and White students persisted until the mid 1950s when the groundbreaking Brown v. Board of Education case forced integration of all public schools. This ruling technically ended de jure segregation, or intentional and government-sanctioned segregation in the public school system (Donato and Hanson 2012). However, once again, as with the abolition of slavery, the ideology behind de facto segregation, or that not enforced by the government but socially upheld through private practices in everyday life, was not addressed (Donato and Hanson 2012). Federal troops were called in to integrate schools and protect Black students against violent White protest. Slave ownership was no longer the means of conferring White privilege, access to a quality education was.
Racial retrenchment, the process by which racial progress obtained through policy gains is challenged or undermined by individual and collective actions, could be seen throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Whites fled neighborhoods that were becoming racially integrated and integrating neighborhood schools, creating impoverished urban centers and wealthy suburbs. The end of de jure segregation and efforts to integrate all-White schools was met with much counter-resistance from White communities. For example, school desegregation in Mississippi prompted the rise of private White segregationist academies starting in 1968 in many places, including New Orleans (Andrews 2002). For White parents, their options were to move to another school district, or create their own educational institutions, and many did. This is an example of a subtle attempt to maintain the racial order and promote disinvestment in public schools, hoarding the resources for better, higher-quality schools (Andrews 2002; Lipsitz 2015).
Today, schools are segregated again by race and by class. Those who did not have the resources to move (Blacks and other minorities) have been forced to stay in public schools despite, in some instances, deplorable conditions (Kozol 2012). The educational picture for Whites is mixed: some have entered private schools – in some instances, state-funded charter schools – and there does exist the rare integrated school district. The contemporary educational picture is complex, shaped by a myriad of competing factors from race to region, charters to the tax base. Yet the impact of Blacks’ historical marginalization within the educational system continues to profoundly affect their life chances.
William Sewell (1971), in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, noted the importance of higher education in conferring economic rewards and social class mobility. Moreover, he stated that, “Those who fail to obtain this training, for whatever reasons, will be severely disadvantaged in the competition for jobs and in many other areas of social life as well” (Sewell 1971:794). Educator Beverley Anderson, in discussing the permissive and pervasive nature of inequality in schooling and society between Blacks and Whites, which builds on the correlation between economic advantage, racial privilege and schooling, notes:
Economic exploitation theory also suggests that racial prejudice has been helpful in maintaining the economic privilege of White Americans. Racial stratification secures better education, occupation, and income for Whites, thereby creating a vested interest in the continued existence of the economic status quo. It is easier to keep Blacks and other people of color who are viewed as inferior in low-status, low paying jobs – and, consequently, keep Whites in higher-status, better-paying jobs – if the latter are considered more “able” by virtue of the benefits gained from racial privilege. (Anderson 1994:445)
Once it was ensured that Blacks did not receive an adequate education, they were effectively locked out of the mainstream job market due to their lack of skills. While virulent racism severely limited occupational opportunities in the South and in the North as well (Landry 2000) prior to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and employers’ adoption of “egalitarian” labor principles, lack of qualifications became a justification that did not require malice. The majority of Blacks were not competitive with their White educated counterparts, effectively preventing them from posing an economic threat. This, in turn, secured the existence of an underclass due to the lack of employment/income options for the advancement of Blacks. Providing Blacks with a poor-quality “special” education hindered their upward mobility and served to prepare them for the “caste like position” ascribed to them in White society; providing a quality education for Whites served as a road to upward mobility and the means by which to maintain their advantage (Bullock 1967:89; Lieberson 1980:135).
A Critical Race Approach to Blacks in America
In Still the Big News, Blauner described the American racial hierarchical structure as having two extremes, “one White, and the other Black” (Blauner 2001:190). James Baldwin reasoned that “the fluidity and insecurity of the American status order required the Negro – so that White people would know where the bottom is, a fixed point in the system to which they could not sink” (Blauner 2001:29). Race as a social construction does not just simply classify and describe differences between groups, its critical function is to characterize social relationships between groups that have unequal access to power (Doane 2003). These power differentials result in a system of racial oppression on the basis of the racial hierarchy.
A major tenet of this approach is the relational nature of racial inequality, the relationship between Black oppression and White domination. Sociologists Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro note that an intimate connection exists between White wealth accumulation and Black poverty, inasmuch as Blacks have had “cumulative disadvantages,” and many Whites have had “cumulative advantages” (1995:5; Lipsitz 2011). Sociologist Joe Feagin further suggests that unjust enrichment of Whites happened as Blacks simultaneously experienced unjust impoverishment (Feagin 2000). Blauner concurs, noting that “White Americans enjoy special privilege in all areas of existence where racial minorities are systematically excluded or disadvantaged: housing and neighborhoods, education, income, and lifestyle” (2001:26).
Yet, in the years since the Civil Rights Movement, there has been no shortage of arguments purporting cultural inferiority as an explanation for the continued subordination of racial minorities despite the removal of formal barriers to their advancement (Glazer and Moynihan 1970). A critical race approach, however, recognizes this as a “reification of culture” in that “culture is treated as a thing unto itself, divorced from the material and social conditions in which it is anchored.” Scholars who espouse this position neglect the fact that “the culture of poor and marginalized groups does not exist in a vacuum.” Often it arises as a response to the social conditions with which they are confronted (Steinberg 1998; Liebow 2003).
For example, the 1968 Kerner Commission Report prepared in response to the rioting in Black ghettos throughout the country “identified ‘White racism’ as a prime reality of American society and the major underlying cause of ghetto unrest” (Blauner 2001:197). Yet, for many, that notion is absurd. Slavery was over a long time ago. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed Blacks equality under the law, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reinstated their voting rights. Some might say White racism can’t be blamed for everything.
Motivated in part by this conundrum, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in his book Racism Without Racists, sought to answer two questions: “How is it possible to have such a tremendous degree of racial inequality in a society in which race is no longer relevant? And how did Whites attempt to explain this difference?” His conceptualization of racism as taking a new form, which he defined as colorblind racism that allows Whites to attribute the contemporary status of Blacks to factors other than race, is critical because it allowed him to notice subtleties in racial speech and explanations that were not espoused in explicitly racial terms. To illustrate, let’s take one of the tenets of “old-fashioned racism,” a belief in justifiable racial discrimination in areas such as employment and higher education (Schuman et al. 1998). A respondent in his study was asked whether “minority students should be provided unique opportunities to be admitted into
