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This is an exhausting talking point about school integration that refuses to die.
Integration isn't about "proximity to whiteness." It's about recognizing the mechanisms that have been used, for over a century, to create second-class citizenship in America, and destroying them.
Integration isn't about "proximity to whiteness." It's about recognizing the mechanisms that have been used, for over a century, to create second-class citizenship in America, and destroying them.
Segregation didn't arise as a way to strip resources from black families, although for many segregationists that was certainly a happy side effect. It was a way of maintaining SOCIAL dominance: calcifying the racial power structure by making it geographic and physical.
You cannot ever achieve full equality if people, can, at a glance, learn and internalize which groups are "supposed" to associate with which other groups -- who is allowed to live and learn with whom.
Segregation creates a society in which racism can live forever while remaining unspoken, because the environment itself does all the work of conveying and perpetuating an ideology -- the ideology of racial hierarchy.
If you don't believe me, consider how white parents have learned to use the racial composition of schools as a code for school desirability. They've learned it because that is how our society is structured: segregation codes everything by race. theatlantic.com/education/arch…
Integration doesn't eliminate all inequality. But it breaks one of the most powerful tools used to perpetuate racism. It forces racists to spread their ideas proactively -- something they often fail at -- rather than insidiously imprinting them on the minds of schoolchildren.
