Have We Overcome?
November 2004

By Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom

Is America still “segregated”? In our deeply divided national conversation on race, the question endures, and it was raised again last spring by the 50th-anniversary celebrations of Brown v. Board of Education. Did that landmark decision by the Supreme Court promise much and deliver little? The ruling itself spoke only of segregation in the nation’s public schools, but its potential sweep was unmistakable. Officially sanctioned separation of the races, the Justices wrote, had the “detrimental effect” of “denoting the inferiority of the Negro group,” generating “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community.” The logic of the decision, if not its words, was thus pertinent to the entire Jim Crow system, from water fountains to hospitals and bus systems, and was indeed rapidly extended to other spheres of public life in the South. The Justices had no magic wand with which to eliminate racism, of course, but in Brown they had declared, in effect, that racial inferiority was an idea whose time was up.

It is easy to forget how far we have come over the past 50 years. When Brown was decided, there was no interracial contact at all in the schools of the South, the region where most African-American children lived. Even ten years later, only a little more than 1 percent of black public-school students in the eleven ex-Confederate states had any white classmates. But state-sanctioned segregation did come to an end. No American child still attends a school that is legally restricted to other pupils of the same race. No state laws send the message (as Justice John Marshall Harlan witheringly put it, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 precedent overturned by Brown) that African-Americans “are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit” with whites. Today, the typical black youngster attends a school that is only about halfblack- an extraordinary change in a half-century.

Or is it? The most curious aspect of the anniversary of Brown last spring was the hand-wringing that accompanied so much of the celebration. Paul Vallas, Philadelphia’s education chief, lamented that “we’re still wrestling with the same issues” today as in 1954. Newsweek opined that “Brown, for all its glory, is something of a bust.” For the Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, “the evil that Brown sought to eliminate-segregation-is still with us.” His verdict was shared by the Washington Post columnist Colbert King. “Segregation has found its way back-if, indeed, it ever left some schools,” he wrote. “To be sure, today’s racial separation is not sanctioned by law. But in terms of racial isolation, the effect is much the same.”

The charge that our schools, in particular, remain segregated-or have been “resegregated”- rests heavily on the work of the social scientist Gary Orfield and his colleagues at Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, whose f indings are regularly and uncritically reported in the media. In his most recent report, Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?, Orfield concedes that legally enforced, de-jure segregation has disappeared, but, he argues, the effect of the constitutional victory has turned out to be small.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Orfield has created an “index of exposure” to measure the extent to which minority students now attend school with white classmates. The findings alarm him. In 2001-02, the typical black youngster attended a school that was 54-percent black and just 31-percent white, with other minorities making up the remainder. The results for Hispanic students are much the same: Hispanics typically form a majority and whites constitute just 28 percent of their classmates. By Orfield’s reckoning, the level of “segregation” in the nation’s schools has returned to that of 1968. For America’s minorities, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of equality has become, it would seem, a “nightmare” from our racist past.

To understand what the argument is about, we have to recall that, whatever larger implications might be drawn from the Brown decision, de-jure segregation was the sole issue it addressed and the only practice that the Court found to be unconstitutional. Indeed, five years after the ruling, Jack Greenberg, a key aide to Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, acknowledged this in declaring that if there were “complete freedom of choice, or geographical zoning, or any other nonracial standard, and all the Negroes still ended up in separate schools, there would seem to be no constitutional objection.”

By the early 1960’s, however, the priorities of liberal opinion-makers had begun to shift. Ending legally enforced segregation was not enough, they maintained. Black students had the right to attend an “integrated” school-that is, one that included a proper proportion of whites. The Supreme Court has never accepted this view, but in many quarters it is now the firmly established conventional wisdom.

What then is the “right” proportion of whites? According to Orfield’s index of exposure, a “segregated” school is a so-called “majority-minority” school-that is, one in which more than half the students are non-whites. Orfield’s measure is not the one used by most social scientists who study the distribution of different racial and ethnic groups in schools, occupations, and housing. The standard measure is known as an index of dissimilarity or imbalance. It does not ask whether there are “enough” whites in a particular school-“enough” being defined by Orfield as more than 50 percent- but looks instead at the school’s racial composition in relation to the wider community. Thus, if the school population in Boston is 15-percent white and 48-percent black, and that is also the rough proportion in every school, there is no cause for concern, even though the white percentage in each school is small.

By this standard (which has its own problems, as we shall see), blacks and whites are integrated in our public schools as never before. A recent study by the Lewis Mumford Center at the State University of New York in Albany found that in districts with a black school population of at least 5 percent, the index of imbalance dropped dramatically between 1968 and 1990. Even in the 1990’s, a decade when many court-ordered desegregation plans came to an end, the index rose by only a single trivial point.

Indeed, the Mumford Center found that the news was encouraging even by Orfield’s index. In 1968, the average black student attended a school that was 19-percent white; in 2000, the figure was 29 percent. Although there was a slight decline during the 1990’s, this was caused by the huge influx of Hispanics and Asians, which reduced the proportion of whites in the public-school population.

In fact, the real news is the steady increase in the percentage of non-whites with whom whites attend school. If blacks and Hispanics were a bit less likely to attend majority-white schools in 2000 than in 1990, the same was true of whites.

The demographic reality behind these trends is hardly a secret. As Orfield’s Civil Rights Project itself showed in a recent report, white enrollment in 2000-01 for 25 of the 26 largest urban school districts averaged a mere 17 percent. Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District is 71-percent Latino, while a mere 10 percent of its students are white. Whites make up only 17 percent of the public-school students in Philadelphia, 15 percent in New York City, 11 percent in Miami, 10 percent in Chicago and Houston, 8 percent in Dallas, and 4 percent in New Orleans and Detroit.

Entire states have also seen a striking drop in the white population of their schools. Hawaii, where barely a fifth of public-school students are white, is the extreme case. But only about a third of California’s pupils are white, and whites are a minority in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas. By the end of the decade, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and New York are likely to join the list. About a third of America’s public-school students live in states where minority children are, or soon will be, the majority.

When Brown was decided 50 years ago, Hispanic children were no more than 2 percent of the nation’s school population; that number has now grown to 16 percent. Today, a third of all American students are black or Latino, and they are concentrated in our big cities. To call schools “segregated” because they ref lect these demographic facts, thereby suggesting no difference between New York in 2004 and Mississippi in 1960, is an egregious misuse of the term.

But a deeper question is whether even the conventional measure of racial “balance” is an appropriate way to gauge racial progress in education. Should we really expect every school in a city to ref lect that city’s overall racial composition? In a footnote to Brown concerning implementation, the Justices told the contending parties to devise plans that, while eliminating segregation, still respected “the limits set by normal geographic school districting.” But unless every neighborhood has the same racial composition-a pattern that no American city even approximates-drawing “normal geographic” districts will inevitably produce schools in which one group or another is disproportionately represented.

On the subject of such residential “segregation,” the rhetoric of liberal critics has been, if anything, even uglier and more irresponsible than on the question of schooling itself. Thus, a widely cited sociological study of contemporary urban neighborhoods published by Harvard only a decade ago bears the lurid title, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the American Underclass. Other recent books that convey the same message include Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy; Apartheid in an American City; and Apartheid, American-Style.

There is no denying that American blacks often live in their own residential enclaves, especially in our big cities. But the same is true of whites and of every other racial and ethnic group-Jews, Chinese, Cambodians, Cubans, Arabs. Such racial and ethnic clustering means that a third of non-Asian minorities attend schools that are less than 10-percent white. And even though whites constitute just over 60 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren, the average white student goes to a school that is 80-percent white.

But why should we expect identical proportions of blacks and whites to live in each and every neighborhood? People like to live near others with whom they identify, and the schools mirror their choices. When asked about their residential preferences, only about 5 percent of blacks said they wished to live on an entirely or almost entirely white block. The vast majority preferred neighborhoods that were half or more than half African-American-in other words, neighborhoods in which the black concentration was “disproportionately” high. According to the 2000 census, this happens to correspond closely to the actual distribution of black city-dwellers.

In a complex, heterogeneous society, it is only natural that people should sort themselves out in urban space along lines of race as well as of religion and social class. This pattern was firmly established in the U.S. by the European immigrants who landed in the cities of the North in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The sociologists who studied these settlements recognized the important social functions served by “Little Italies” and “Poletowns.”

The history of America’s black “ghettos” is, of course, another matter-at least in part. If residential clusters of immigrants long reflected the preferences of the immigrant groups themselves, concentrations of blacks were largely the result of the determination of whites to exclude them. Among the tools used to achieve this end were covenants that restricted the rental and sale of property, “gentlemen’s agreements” among real-estate agents, and harassment of blacks who moved into white neighborhoods.

Even so, however, brute exclusion was never the entire story. In some measure, black migrants from the South (like Europeans from abroad) were choosing to live in sections of cities like Chicago where other blacks, who had arrived before them, were residing. They found apartments where their kin or friends lived and where they felt culturally at home. Nevertheless, most social scientists at the time resolutely dismissed the possibility that American blacks made residential choices based on cultural comfort.

This was part and parcel of a larger syndrome: many scholars rejected the very idea that American blacks possessed a distinctive, positive identity of their own. In his classic 1944 treatise, An American Dilemma, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal spoke for much of the liberal and academic elite live in census tracts in which they are a minority of the inhabitants.

In short, blacks are no longer a uniquely stigmatized racial minority. They are becoming, in important respects, just another American ethnic group (as the widespread embrace of the hyphenated term “African-American” suggests). To be sure, average black family income is lower than that of whites and Asians. Nevertheless, the persistence of predominantly black neighborhoods is no more surprising-or troubling-than the clustering of Jews in, say, Brooklyn, or of Chinese in Chinatown.

When reporters, activists, and social scientists describe today’s urban landscape as “segregated,” they imply that a high concentration of blacks or Latinos-unlike high concentrations of other groups-diminishes the quality of life in these communities. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, the authors of American Apartheid, argue that the current level of racial clustering in urban neighborhoods “systematically undermines the social and economic well-being of blacks in the United States.”

Can this be true? Is race itself the deciding factor in the problems of these communities? Does the same analysis extend to heavily black suburbs like Prince George’s County, Maryland-settings to which high-income blacks, with plenty of choices, have eagerly gravitated? Many well-meaning liberals still find it impossible to see anything but discrimination when black families are not randomly distributed across the residential landscape. But there is nothing wrong with racial and ethnic enclaves- indeed, there is much that is right with them-so long as blacks are no longer barred from neighborhoods in which they would prefer to live.

Similarly, labeling schools with few whites as “segregated” implies that learning there is likely to be compromised. Although total racial isolation as a way of life is highly undesirable, the racial mix in a school does not determine the quality of the children’s education. Those who repeat the charge of segregation like a mantra seem to believe that the central problem with urban schools is that they are not white enough-a conviction that itself should cause some discomfort within the civil-rights community. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 1995 desegregation decision, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Why advocates would continue to resort to the rhetoric of segregation is not difficult to underwhen he contended that “American Negro culture” was simply a “distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.” In an unpublished review of An American Dilemma, the black writer Ralph Ellison sharply attacked Myrdal. Can a people “live and develop for over 300 years simply by reacting?” Ellison asked. “Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” And he concluded: “Much of Negro culture might be negative, but there is also much of great value, of richness, which, because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful, Negroes will not willingly disregard.”

In the 1940’s, when Myrdal and Ellison were writing, the balance between residential choice and residential coercion was still heavily tipped in the direction of coercion where blacks were concerned. By the 1960’s, scholars and civil-rights spokesmen began to recognize the distinctive culture of American blacks and to see them as agents shaping their own future. At the same time, the racial attitudes of whites were changing dramatically. In a 1942 Gallup poll, only 36 percent of whites had said that it “would not make any difference” to them if “a Negro with the same income and education as theirs moved into their block.” In 1956, the figure was up to 53 percent, a bare majority. By 1966, it was 71 percent, and by 1972 a remarkable 85 percent. It was this shift in opinion that made possible, among other things, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, with its powerful sanctions against discrimination in the real-estate market.

With the advent of more tolerant racial attitudes and tough civil-rights laws, the racial integration of neighborhoods rose dramatically. Blacks have moved to suburbia at an even more rapid pace than whites. In 1960, a mere 15 percent of African-Americans lived in the suburbs; today the figure is 36 percent. As a proportion of the total suburban population, the black share has nearly doubled over these years, and now stands at almost 9 percent-surprisingly close to proportionality for a group that constitutes only 12 percent of the American population.

Moreover, neighborhoods in our cities and suburbs have become far more racially mixed than they were only a few decades ago. Between 1960 and 2000, the proportion of blacks living in census tracts that were over four-f ifths black fell from 47 percent to just under 30 percent. Equally striking, over the same period the proportion residing in black-majority tracts dropped from 70 to 50 percent. Half of all African-Americans now stand. It makes good tactical sense. The word’s connotations are so invidious as to bring an air of legitimacy to any action that can be sold as addressing the problem. It makes argument unnecessary, and it stifles debate.

For much of the past generation, the opponents of “segregation” in our schools placed their hopes on the policy of court-ordered busing. Today, that policy having proved a disaster, they have no serious remedies to offer for the alleged scourge they identify. They know that most schools in our big cities will remain “majority-minority” into the indefinite future. And so, their aim is simpler: to stir white guilt, in the hope of extracting additional funds for pet causes like smaller class sizes and more generous teacher contracts. If they cannot find more whites to “integrate” the schools, more money will suffice.

It hardly needs saying that all is not well in the schools that black and Hispanic children attend, whether in inner cities or in affluent suburbs. The racial gap in academic achievement has become the most important source of ongoing racial inequality. Equal skills and knowledge mean equal earnings, and the typical black or Hispanic youngster is leaving high school with junior-highschool skills. But to invoke “segregation” as the cause of this gap, when it plainly is not, is to provide just one more excuse for the cultural and educational failures at the root of this problem-and for the schools that fail to confront them.

Those who recall what life was like for blacks in the Deep South before Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be outraged by the equation of racial imbalance with segregation. The black children who broke the color-line in Jim Crow schools-the children who faced white mobs spewing insults and brandishing sticks-showed extraordinary courage in the face of state-sanctioned racism. Advocates of racially balanced schools are not engaged in a remotely similar fight. In claiming otherwise, they not only rob the civil-rights movement of its achievement, but turn our eyes toward the wrong prize-schools that look right rather than schools in which children, whatever their color, are truly learning.

Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom are the co-authors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, recently issued in paperback (Simon & Schuster). They are at work on a book about the concept of de-facto segregation.

©2004 Commentary

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