Three speakers yesterday condemned the Supreme Court's recent ruling that public schools must be entirely colorblind in their admissions policies.
Over 150 people gathered in Distler Performance Hall to hear keynote speaker Ian Haney López and two other panelists discuss the issues surrounding last June's court decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
López is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has written books on the legal and social incarnations of race relations.
López began his address by repeating a well-known quote from Chief Justice John Roberts' decision in the court case: "The way to stop discrimination based on race is stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Critics say the high court's decision undid much of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which forced the integration of public schools.
López said he "profoundly disagrees" with Roberts' notion that affirmative action is itself a form of unfair discrimination and that it perpetuates discrimination based on race. He then offered a brief outline of the history of race, segregation and schooling in the United States.
Brown v. Board of Education reversed the 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which codified the system of racial segregation by condoning an arrangement of two systems, "separate but equal." The Brown decision declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," a ruling that López said should still ring true, as it did in 2003 when the Supreme Court ruled to allow affirmative action in higher-education admissions.
López explained that in 1965, when South Carolina courts succeeded in halting integration by using the notion of colorblindness, communities in North Carolina tried to follow suit. But North Carolina's actions were taken to the Supreme Court, which overturned these efforts to use colorblindness to stall integration in the 1971 Swan case.
Those who want to promote segregation and therefore possibly deny an equal education to millions of minority children "lost in 1971, but they won in 2007," López said.
López highlighted the literal and societal meanings of the word segregation, criticizing Roberts' interpretation of integration policies as their own form of segregation.
"Segregation was about social debasement, promoting the idea that minorities were tainted, disease ridden, filthy, morally dirty, innately inferior," he said. "Segregation in education is about political and economic control of minorities."
On the other hand, the parents of white students in Seattle used the word "integration" in an entirely different sense, deeming it a form of discrimination because their children were denied access to the more competitive public schools when race was used as a tiebreaker. This is subtly different from the meaning of segregation to which López subscribes.
"Integration is a response that ... seeks to break the connection between race and character ... to insist that there is no inferior group that must be separated from the rest of society," he said.
"It's a direct repudiation of the idea that some are destined to work with their hands and some are destined to work with their minds."
To highlight the current segregation crisis in the United States, López pointed out that in 1968 in the South, around 70 percent of black students attended schools that consisted of more than 90 percent black or minority students. This issue was greatly alleviated by 1980, when only 23 percent of students attended a school that was more than 90 percent minority students.
But the number of students currently in schools consisting primarily of minorities was back up to one third in 2002. "Segregation is coming back upon us again," López said.
The problem with having schools full of minorities, López explained, is that the education they receive is probably inferior. "Race and class are completely intertwined in the United States," he said.
To conclude, López outlined what he thinks needs to be done about the current situation involving modern segregation and integration in schools. We must recognize that pretending that unfair differences between races have not been built up in this country will ensure that the problem is never solved, he said.
"We must reject the superficial allure of colorblindness," he said. "We won't succeed in addressing these issues unless we take these things on directly."
He said that the problem of racial inequalities could be solved in possibly "as short a time as one dedicated generation," though it may take centuries more. "We'll need to mobilize around race so long as racial subordination remains a part of our society," he said.
After López's hour long speech, Tony Pierantozzi, superintendent of the Somerville Public Schools, and Kahris White-McLaughlin, affirmative action officer for the Cambridge Public Schools, spoke for about fifteen minutes each. They offered examples on a local level of the grand ideas López had discussed.
All three speakers pointed out that minority children often end up in the worst schools because of their socioeconomic backgrounds. They stressed that in no way should the United States adopt colorblindness as a solution to the mounting problem of inequality in education based on race.
The event was moderated by Assistant Professor of Urban Education Sabina Elena Vaught.
