Desegregating Ourselves

Challenge the biases and beliefs at the root of disproportionality Although the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education recognized the detrimental effects of racist ideology in American education, disproportionality and inequality persist in our schools. Desegregating Ourselves offers educators a framework for examining and disrupting the deficit-based biases and belief systems that undergird our education system and continue to harm minoritized students. This groundbreaking book examines the root causes of persistent disproportionality, including systemic inequality, color blindness, deficit thinking, and poverty disciplining–all of which create barriers to success for marginalized students. Features include: An in-depth survey of race and racism in the American education system, its laws, and its policies, all of which perpetuate systemic inequality and harmful stereotypes A practical framework for developing cross-cultural skills and dispositions that challenge our biases and promote educational equity Concrete strategies for interrupting and replacing deficit-based thinking and prejudices Powerful reflections based on survey data from over 4,000 educators, which vividly illustrate how our beliefs manifest in schools and in our treatment of students Desegregating Ourselves is a critical guide for educators brave enough to address disproportionality by confronting the biases and belief systems that impact marginalized students. By learning to cultivate cross-cultural skills and dispositions, educators can realize the vision of educational equity for all students.

Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.

Sarah Patton Boyle’s personal crusade for civil rights began in the fall of 1950, when the University of Virginia refused to admit Gregory Swanson, the Negro student who challenged its policy of segregation. Confident that this wrong could be righted quickly, Mrs. Boyle, the wife of a professor at the University, went forth to do her share—to meet not only with the burning crosses of white hatred but with decided wariness on the part of Negroes. Here is the story of Mrs. Boyle’s lonely struggle—the more courageous for her aristocratic Virginia background and traditional Southern upbringing. It is also the story of her painful re-education—of a Southerner’s discovery of “the real Negro, the real white man, and herself.” A fascinating, reaffirming read. “It should be read by everyone with the brotherhood of man.”—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “A most interesting and revealing book, honest, compassionate. The South needs it; Negroes need it; northerners need it. It is beautiful in its candor and deeply moving....”—Lillian Smith

This title was first published in 2002: Over the past fifty years, numerous geographical concepts and methodologies have been developed to study urban segregation. This volume brings together an international team of scholars, practitioners and policy makers to examine the latest of these. The first section of this fascinating book sees contributors proposing innovative ideas and new conceptual models for the study of segregation in cities that undergo globalization. They assess the idea that segregation should be studied for individuals in respect to different spatial resolutions, including the study of the formation of inter-ethnic spatial networks. This is followed by an examination of questions concerning the associations among segregation, poverty and policies. The final section highlights patterns of segregation in four countries: South Africa, China, Canada and the Ruhr area, each of them representing different multicultural and transformational aspects. They also emphasize the socio-historical context in which patterns of segregation and desegregation appeared.

The desegregation situation is the keynote theme of the following chapters. I Each of them touches on a different dimension of the situation: the historical, the temporal, the spatial. But the reader, perusing the essays with the situation in mind, should remember that the desegregation situation should not be inter preted literally. Authorities and adults certainly, school-age children probably, are influenced by their awareness of a sequence of past and future situations. Some may even operate with William James's (1890, p. 608) notion of "the specious present" that "has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming," thus reducing the potency of the present situation. Others may be dancing to a slower tempo of change, thus becoming more responsive to the present situation. Whatever the perceived tempo, many must share the view that the future may reverse the direction of the past. Some may see that new future direction as unswerving, unending, or long-lasting; others may see it as short-lived. And it is through attention to the phenomenological description of desegregation that these issues can be explored; a theme that is considered in several of the following chapters.

"The United States Commission on Civil Rights sponsored a consultation in 1975 to review the relationship between desegregation, court orders, and suburbanization, as well as to assess what further role the Commission might play in discharging its responsibility to advance the constitutional rights of all children to a desegregated education. This book contains four papers which were presented and discussed at the consultation."--Abstract from ERIC website.