In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review Samuel Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia, reviews three new books on the legacy of Brown that, he claims, are “virtually a brain scan of the black intelligentsia, circa 2004.” Thus it may be quite revealing, and is at least interesting, that all three books are highly critical of Brown. One, by Derrick Bell, even provides what he regards as a more appealing alternative opinion in which the court, rather than overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine, would have affirmed it and simply required actual equality.
All the authors seem to agree that what Brown required was integration, and Freedman himself writes approvingly of one author’s call for “completing Brown’s unfinished agenda with more racial mixing.” It never seems to occurred to the reviewer or the reviewees that Brown‘s real unfinished agenda is ending discrimination based on race. [Note: I’ve corrected a blog-lading error in the last sentence that careful reader Laura called to my attention.]
Finally, I suspect that the appeal of “diversity” will fade after a while, when “the black intelligentsia,” circa 20??, realizes that its purpose is to produce integration, and that it has been no more satisfactory at solving underlying problems than integration was.
ADDENDUM
In an accompanying “dialog” between Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, West calls “the conservative appropriation” of
Excuse me, but isn’t that exactly what the Court did in Grutter?
I didn’t get the impression that the authors thought that Brown required integration, and certainly the article suggests that they don’t think that now. It may have been at the time that allowing blacks access to better facilities resulted in the expedience of integration, but the thrust of the article seems to be a gentle disabusing of the notion that the unfinished business of Brown is integration. What “anguish” the authors have for a lack of integration seems focused on the increasingly isolated poor black communities where the unfinished business is a chicken-and-egg problem of economics improving education or of education improving economics. I’m not sure why you would expect the authors to think that “the real unfinished agenda is ending discrimination based on race” given historical precedent and people’s tendencies. The impression I get is that the real unfinished agenda here is ending all this talk of unfinished agendas irregardless of the status of discrimination.
wmd – I may not have been clear (if so, it won’t have been the first time). All four authors, I think — the three book authors and the reviewer — pretty clearly believe that Brown I required integration, that Brown II undermined that goal by allowing it to be achieved under local control “with all deliberate speed,” and that as a result Brown has been a massive failure. One of the book authors and the reviewer appear to believe that integration remains a worthy goal; the other two do not. Curiously, Henry Louis Gates, in the companion “dialogue” with Cornel West, said that his skepticism about integration “curiously” aligns him with Clarence Thomas.
As for the remainder of your comment, I don’t believe I do “expect the authors to think that ‘the real unfinished agenda is ending discrimination based on race'” simply because that’s what I think it is. Indeed, as I implied by noting their agreement with Grutter, they have no problem at all with state and local governments or the federal government engaging in discrimination based on race.I also don’t understand why anyone would think that “historical precedent” and “people’s tendencies” somehow render ending discrimination unimportant. In any event, I think they make it necessary.
John, it appears that some of your commentary didn’t make it onto the post. Maybe that’s why it’s not clear.
Derrick Bell has an interesting take: affirming separate but equal and requiring the equal part. I’d make one slight adjustment: separate but equal OK as long as equal is really equal and no child is turned away from a school due to race. In other words, no de jure segregation, de facto OK. As I’ve stated before, I think the de facto stuff would have died a natural death if left alone.
Our black mayor, who previously was the school superintendent, and the subject of whose doctoral dissertation was desegregation in this city (I’d love to read it) graduated from Booker T. Washington High School here, which has always been a black school from the very beginning. He was quoted in the paper today as saying that desegregation ruined the black schools in this city. Today BTW High School has a 36% graduation rate.
Well, I guess integration has many meanings from desegration to racial mixing to the effect of busing. What seems clear from the article is that at the time integration was required to give some push to desegration while busing, in retrospect, pushed too hard. It’s not unreasonable to think that had some good-faith effort been made to ensure near-equal quality of all schools and access to the nearest school of choice, some of that pushing might have been attenuated if not prevented. But those were the days.