"Why We Need to Raise Hell"

By Jack E. White

Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it. Instead, for the past 40 years, we played a shell game with desegregation in which blacks chased after whites who would not stand still long enough to be integrated with. The result: public schools so separate and vastly unequal that Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown v. Board, might as well be the law of the land.

This sorry situation is, to be sure, mostly the fault of whites who pay lip service to equal rights but cut and run as soon as enough blacks move into their neighborhood. But many privileged African Americans are no more committed to public school integration than their white counterparts if it means sending their children to class with poor black kids. The main obstacle to integration is not race but class.

In fact, there is a good deal of integration going on among those who can afford it. Consider the small number of schools, both public and private, where something approaching stable integration exists. What most have in common is an affluent clientele and a determination to maintain a diverse student body. The well-educated black parents who can afford to send their kids to private school--or to live in one of the expensive areas with a good public system--are accustomed to dealing with whites as equals. Their well-scrubbed, well-dressed, well-mannered offspring blend right in with the well-scrubbed, well-mannered white children and pose no perceived threat.

Moreover, these "safe" black children are always in a very distinct minority. There are enough of them for blacks to feel they are not just tokens but not so many that whites feel uneasy. The poor kids who attend such schools are charity cases, gifted children carefully selected to make sure they fit in.

It amounts to a cynical bargain. White parents congratulate themselves for doing the racial right thing at no real cost to themselves. Affluent blacks get the assurance that their children will learn to get along in the white world in which they will someday compete and the status that goes with sending them to a prestigious school. Most poor black children, meanwhile, are stuck in decrepit ghetto classrooms.

What is truly dismaying about all this is the degree to which privileged African Americans--including myself--have acquiesced to the process. Just like many whites, a lot of us walked away from the fight for school integration once we made sure our own progeny would receive its undeniable benefits by enrolling them in high-priced private academies. This hypocritical approach reflects the desire to seek the best for one's own and frustration with recalcitrant whites. But it also undercuts our ability to prevail on whites to support public school integration. Why should they do what we are unwilling to do ourselves?

In cities such as Washington, it is not uncommon for black school administrators and teachers to enroll their children in private or suburban schools. If the city schools are not good enough for their offspring, they are not good enough for Chelsea Clinton or anyone else. By mismanaging the schools, the black professionals who run them have betrayed the best of the African-American tradition, which values education above all else, and have given whites who never believed in integration an easy excuse for abandoning it.

Herewith a radical proposal for breaking the impasse: revive the civil rights movement, which went into limbo long before some of its most important goals were accomplished, and aim it not only at racist whites but also at complacent middle-class blacks. All of us need a jolting reminder that integration's real purpose was not to produce Norman Rockwellish racial brotherhood. It was a strategy to ensure that black children, especially poor ones, would receive the same quality of instruction, textbooks and facilities that white children do. The genteel race mixing that goes on among the elite is no substitute for a determined national effort to include poor nonwhite children in America's bounty--and if it takes a new round of sit-ins to put the issue back on the national agenda, so be it.

Such a campaign would be disruptive and strongly opposed, but then so was the battle to desegregate lunch counters. America has never made progress on racial issues unless there was enough agitation to force society to take action. Just as it did in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court is again defending the racial status quo--and it always will in the absence of intense political pressure.

Black economist Glenn C. Loury makes a powerful case for the rediscovery of black racial honor. He believes progress toward racial equality depends on acknowledging and rectifying the dysfunctional behaviors in the black community. This is usually taken to mean the underclass must clean up its act before it can move into the mainstream. But there are dysfunctional behaviors outside the ghetto that could also stand re-examination: the white notion that the country has already done enough to secure racial equity, and black middle-class complicity in the deterioration of inner-city schools. In both cases, honor depends on rediscovering our commitment to treating all children fairly. If it takes new turmoil to bring that about, that is a price we should be willing to pay.

1. Why We Need to Raise Hell - Time