Perspectives

Shall We Overcome?

Fifty Years Later, We’re Often Still Separate and Unequal

SINCE THE 1954 U.S. SUPREME COURT decision in Brown v. Board of Education struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine and mandated that America’s public schools be desegregated, efforts to implement the ruling have met with mixed success, both in the schools and in the courts. New research in the field shows that some schools are now resegregating, while there is evidence that the courts are less inclined to intervene in the public school system.

Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, efforts to implement affirmative action policies have also had a contentious history. The Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke ruling set limits that aimed to prevent affirmative action on behalf of minorities from coming at the expense of the rights of the majority. And while states like California, Washington, and Florida have recently taken steps to ban affirmative action, the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action in a 2003 ruling by arguing that the University of Michigan Law School could use race as one of many factors in admitting students.

As the nation reflects upon the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, now is an opportune time to ponder the question, “Whatever happened to integration?” In a wide-ranging and provocative talk at RAND, Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Boston University and director of the university’s Institute on Race and Social Division, presented some thoughts on the subject.

Reconsidering Affirmative Action

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor delivered the majority opinion in 2003 upholding affirmative action, she argued that the need for affirmative action today is “extraordinary.” She elaborated: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS   George E. C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit join hands as they pose outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 1954, the day the court ruled that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The three lawyers led the fight for abolition of segregation.

Loury disagreed that affirmative action is an extraordinary measure for today, asserting that the need for it will continue as long as society retains a “demand for racial diversity.” That the demand still exists, he noted, is evident in the friend-of-the-court briefs submitted in favor of the 2003 ruling.

In one of those briefs, American businesses “made clear that the skills needed in today’s global market-place can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people.” The military filed a similar brief, arguing that a “highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps . . . is essential to the military’s ability to ful- fill its principal mission to provide national security.”

If affirmative action were constitutionally banned, said Loury, institutions that still want to promote the goals of affirmative action would find the means to do so within the letter of the law. But he claimed that such “color-blind” means could be less effective, less efficient, and even less merit-based than the current “color-sighted” affirmative action policies.

For example, the “percentage plans” now in place in Texas and Florida guarantee admission to the public university system for the top 10 and 20 percent of high school students, respectively. One drawback of such plans, according to Loury, is that they could admit a less-qualified African American student from a less-competitive inner-city school at the expense of a more-qualified African American student from a more-competitive suburban school.

Closing the Racial Gap in Test Scores

Loury acknowledged that there is still wide disparity between racial groups in the distribution of test scores and recognized the need to close the gap. But he argued that closing the racial gap might not be an appropriate goal for public policy, for two reasons.

First, he worried that framing the problem in racial terms could backfire if we tackle the problem and then fail to solve it. Such a failure could exacerbate racial stigma and further diminish the position of African Americans in society.

Second, he said that the gap may be a product of “African American culture” broadly defined, for example, as how African American parents raise their children or how African American kids respond to peer pressure. From a public policy perspective, closing the gap would thus put policymakers in the untenable position of trying to alter some aspects of African American culture.

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS   U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson reaches to shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after presenting the civil rights leader with one of 72 pens used to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1964. Surrounding the president, from left, are Rep. Roland Libonati, D-Ill.; Rep. Peter Rodino, D-N.J.; Rev. King; Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y.; and Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League.

For both reasons, Loury stressed the need to frame the public policy problem in a way that does not “racialize” the solution. The problem could be framed more inclusively, either as raising the test scores of all poor-performing students or of improving the way we, as a society, raise our children, regardless of race, and encourage them to resist peer pressure. In the latter case, he went on to suggest that efforts to influence African American culture from within the African American community itself (such as working with parents through community-based churches) would be better positioned to address this issue without racializing it.

Overcoming Racial Stigma

As for the route to integration, Loury said the focus of efforts during the past few decades has been on eliminating discrimination in “contract” — or formal discrimination against African Americans in the job market or in the educational system. Such a focus was the driving force behind both Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act.

Loury argued for the need to switch the focus to overcoming discrimination in “contact” — informal discrimination against African Americans that constrains how they socialize and network and, thus, impedes their social and economic mobility. He said the root of discrimination in contact is an age-old stigma — a pervasive anti–African American bias that goes back to slavery and that finds one expression today in the disproportionate number of African Americans in the prison system. The stigma is so pervasive, he argued, that many African Americans have actually come to accept some of the negative images (such as that good educational performance is somehow not authentically African American) and have begun to live out those negative images.

Loury defined integration neither as an educational goal nor as a legal contract but as the “embrace of intimate social intercourse across racial lines.” Only that type of integration, he concluded, could overcome the historical stigma.