Race in the Schools: Perpetuating White Dominance? (review)

Judith Blau and colleagues do not mince words in their latest book about their position that whites' ideological beliefs about blacks and their culture(s) are undermining the progress of not only students of color but also white students. Advocating cultural pluralism, Blau and colleagues argue that it will be impossible to attain as long as whites see themselves as the criterion group that others must emulate within schools and other spheres of society. They also claim white liberalism poses a problem for America's schools because it cannot easily accommodate cultural diversity and group differences since "it emphasizes rights for individuals as detached persons and not as one of their rights to identity, group membership, and social roots." Liberalism, they assert, has a slant toward monoculturalism and assimilation; and many who hold liberal views are limited by their lack of attention to cultural inequality within schools and other social institutions.

Though liberals and conservatives alike might charge that Blau and colleagues use this book to promote their own ideological agenda, the two introductory chapters positing these assertions are some of the book's most provocative parts. Unfortunately, the subsequent empirical chapters only appear to indirectly address this central claim. The authors do less empirically to prove the ill effects of liberalism and instead succumb to taking a defensive stance against those who hold narrow perspectives about blacks, their culture(s), and ability by trying to prove that black adolescents possess the same tastes and values for education, are either equally or more highly principled than white youth, and that white adolescents are likely to suffer from being segregated in homogeneous neighborhoods where there is little economic inequality. To substantiate these arguments, they use multivariate analyses of data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), a nationally representative study of a cohort of 8th graders born in 1974, and the High School Effectiveness Study (HSES), a representative study of 8th graders from the 30 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and their follow-ups with the same students over a six-year period.

In these postindustrial economic moments, according to the authors, whites are now anxious about their economic well-being and consequently have recast a seemingly benign set of foundational U.S. values centered on individual success to support their assumptions and claims about their superior efforts and attitudes and thus their rights to be on top. They also claim that whites now segregate themselves within neighborhoods and within tracked curricula, maintaining disproportionate control of the upper echelon of academic classes. Shifting the lens of hypersegregation away from poor blacks and Latinos, Blau and colleagues argue that economic and residential segregation, as well as and whites' limited interracial contact in their schools and neighborhoods, limit their "social learning" about others and the world about them. Obviously, their mission, though laudable, is to prove the benefits of interracial schooling and neighboring for whites. For example, they show that white students living in neighborhoods with relatively high levels of social inequality and diversity are less likely to engage in substance use. Moreover, they claim that white students enrolled in small to medium-size schools with diverse student bodies are most likely to experience positive racial relations, which in the authors' opinions will benefit them in their adult lives.

Since the book is focused primarily on social relations, certain questions about academic achievement and attainment are less investigated. For instance, they do not advance our knowledge about why black and Latino students are more likely to engage in behaviors that are not conducive to high achievement, such as cutting and being late for class. What are the salient social and cultural processes occurring within schools that might derail these students' interests in their classes, and how is white liberalism implicated in these processes? It is interesting that the authors deduce that relatively lower test scores, and comparatively lower achievement than Asian and white students, do not preclude blacks from pursuing...