Race and Education: 1954-2007 (review)

This book is a jeremiad against mandated racial integration of schools. Raymond Wolters, a historian at the University of Delaware, states his overall position up front: "in terms of educational benefits, desegregation has been problematic, and integration a failure" (vii). Wolters reviews the tortuous history of court decisions, and his chief complaint throughout is that "the constitutional mandate was changed from prohibiting racial discrimination to separate the races to requiring racial discrimination to mix them" (137). As Wolters shows, the initial prohibition against official segregation floundered for two reasons. First, after an initial period of massive resistance, Southern states realized they could deftly circumvent the Brown decision by embracing the principle of "freedom of choice," since few students of either race "chose" to attend schools that were predominantly of another race. Second, as desegregation "moved North," the issue shifted from de jure to de facto segregation, and desegregation policy morphed into mandatory integration to enforce "racial balance." This was achieved primarily through busing. However, as cities became predominantly non-white, partly because of white flight to the suburbs, racial balance became a statistical impossibility. Given the fierce popular resistance to busing, it is remarkable how long liberal elites, backed by the courts and bestowed with legitimacy by social scientists, doggedly pursued school integration until it was finally torpedoed by a Supreme Court packed with Republican appointees. In the 1974 Milliken decision, the Supreme Court blocked a metropolitan plan that would have bused Detroit students to suburban schools. This was the death knell of "forced integration," followed by a series of rulings that, in the name of colorblindness, ended even voluntary programs to achieve racial integration.

Wolters defiantly challenges liberal orthodoxies about racial integration. There is no denying that the liberal project for school integration has been a failure, at least gauged by the fact that schools are more segregated today than in the 1950s. Given this fact, there is good reason to subject liberal orthodoxies to critical scrutiny, and to ask some hard questions. Was school integration a liberal mistake? Was it predicated on false assumptions about race and class, especially given the class character of schooling? Did liberals think that school integration was a panacea that could overcome the effects of entrenched racism in labor markets and housing, which engendered deep poverty and racial isolation? Was busing a viable policy or did it backfire, producing white flight and exacerbating segregation? To be sure, there are painful lessons to be learned from Wolters' skewering of liberals, as one liberal scheme after another failed to deliver on its promises, and as advocates of integration scrambled to explain the disappointing outcomes, only to lapse into victim-blaming discourses. First they placed the blame on the cultural deprivation of children; then on the inveterate racism of teachers and their self-fulfilling prophecies; then on the deficient black family; then on a "street culture" that lured children away from schooling; more recently on the subversive influence of hip hop and "the cool pose" and a youth culture that disparages intellectual achievement as "acting white."

The problem is not that Wolters challenges liberal orthodoxy, but rather his resort to biology. Wolters tells the reader flat out: "I am an agnostic when it comes to the significance of IQ tests and the extent and import of differences in brain size" (x). He laments the fact that Hitler gave studies of race and intelligence a bad name. And he speaks in the argot of the white supremacist, objecting to racial "mixing" and "intermingling." What he does not consider is the possibility that the liberal project was a failure of liberalism itself. It was hardly realistic to bus poor black children to schools in middle-class white neighborhoods without addressing the constellation of factors that consigned blacks to live in impoverished ghettos in the first place. In retrospect, it might have been better to have heeded Derrick Bell's advice, born out of despair, to settle for separate but equal schools, on the proviso that they were made to be truly equal...