Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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includes development of a variety of curricular models for engaging students in academic learning across politicized social difference (Burris and Welner 2007; Landsman and Lewis 2006; Nieto 2010; Oakes 2005; Pollock 2008) and strategies for socially organizing students within the school and classroom to promote more equal status and engagement in curricular and co-curricular activities (Fine, Weis, and Powel 1997; González, Moll, and Amanti 2005; Hawley 2007; Phelan, Davidson, and Yu 1993; Slavin 1995). Within this literature is a growing body of research that specifically addresses the opportunities and challenges that arise in schooling contexts that bring together working-class Latino populations with middle-class Whites (Cammarota 2007; Conchas 2001; Espinoza- Herold 2003; Gándara 2002; González and Moll 2002; Grady 2002; Mehan et al. 1996; Reyes and Laliberty 1992; Slavin et al. 1996).
If an increasing number of U.S. citizens believe in the potential virtues of integrated schooling—and there are tested, evidence-based models to facilitate learning in such settings—why is school integration in such retreat, and how is it being justified? It would seem important to get at the root of this paradox.
Retreat from Integration and Advancement of School Resegregation in the United States
To date, a broad range of scholarly research has sought to explain the sociohistorical, economic, political, and legal factors that have marred the institutionalization of racial integration as an equity-based school reform strategy in the United States since Brown v. Board of Education. For the purposes of my analysis, I wish to identify and discuss two dominant lines of this inquiry.3 One approach, which I will call the White resistance/deserved segregation framework, relies heavily on macrohistorical analyses of shifting material conditions, race-and class-related interests, and federal court decisions in the twentieth century that have shaped public policy, citizenship narratives, and legal-discursive regimes in manners that have undermined or weakened mandates for school integration and justified a return to more “separate but equal” public schooling conditions. The second, which I will call the normative whiteness/subtractive assimilation framework, pays closer attention to the impact of local-level forces, intergroup relations, and racialization processes and the ways in which they combine to generate the social and institutional conditions that limit school integration efforts on the ground. My discussion here is meant not only to identify how each framework contributes significantly to our understanding of continuing processes of school segregation but also to consider how, by integrating insights from each approach, it may be possible to imagine what a democratic countertendency capable of challenging school resegregation processes might look like. In the final section of this chapter, I draw on the work of Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues to consider how a broad rearticulation of values of fairness and inclusion in the schooling process— spread widely through mobilizations and social movement activism led primarily by working-class communities of color—may have the potential to disarm resegregation campaigns by promoting the idea of shared, high-quality public schooling as a fundamental right of all citizens in the United States. While seemingly far-fetched, such a rearticulation of values and norms was accomplished, on a smaller scale, in a series of Latino-led citizen mobilizations against a ten-year campaign to resegregate local schools in the Pleasanton Valley region of central California, and it is worth considering how such a feat was accomplished and what might be learned from it (the extended case study is offered in Chapter 7).
Suburban Development, White Entitlement and Shifting Discourses of Citizenship in the United States
The White resistance/deserved segregation explanatory approach to the retreat from public school desegregation is perhaps best exemplified in the work of educational scholar Gary Orfield and sociologist George Lipsitz. Each, in separate lines of research, has looked deeply into the political and material histories of race and class in twentieth-century United States that have fueled a process of “refusal, resistance, and renegotiation” (in Lipsitz’s 1998 terms) on the part of residents in predominantly White, middle-class residential communities to avoid a host of federal and state desegregation mandates meant to secure equal access to educational resources and to offer minority students opportunities they have historically been denied (see also Orfield and Eaton 1996). Rather than portraying such political strategies of resistance as predicated on openly racist beliefs, Lipsitz identifies what he calls a “possessive investment in whiteness” whereby “white supremacy is usually less a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt than a system for protecting the privileges of whites” (1998: viii) by denying communities of color opportunities for such things as asset accumulation, upward mobility, and—in this case—high-quality integrated education.
To account for the construction of White entitlement in these terms, Lipsitz and others (see, for example, Omi and Winant 1994; Brodkin 1998) have pointed to a key set of twentieth-century politico-historical developments in the United States that have fundamentally reshaped the country’s race/class demographics, political identities, and notions of citizenship in the post-civil rights era. Chief among these developments was the creation and expansion of U.S. residential suburbs from the early twentieth century to the late 1960s as “expressedly racist and exclusionary housing markets” (Lipsitz and Oliver 2010) whose occupation was facilitated, in large part, by federal government-sponsored home loan and mortgage assistantship programs that actively and systematically promoted racial segregation (see also Massey and Denton 1998; Mahoney 1997; Jackson 1985). By condoning racial covenants on the purchase of suburban properties, refusing to lend money to people of color, and colluding with private citizens and local real estate agents in an array of associated discriminatory practices that included racial zoning, redlining, steering, and block busting, the U.S. federal government assured that 98 percent of Federal Housing Act loans disbursed between 1934 and 1968 were provided exclusively to Whites (Lipsitz and Oliver 2010; Roithmayr 2007). Further safeguarding suburban areas as reserved largely for White, middle-class settlement was the prioritized allocation of federal funds for highway construction to the suburbs and the associated financing of urban renewal programs that tended to displace urban minority residents into further racially and socioeconomically segregated living arrangements within metropolitan areas (see Massey and Denton 1997). As Martha Mahoney has remarked, racial segregation and the “Whiteness” of suburbs in the United States are not incidentally paired; “government-sponsored segregation helped inscribe in American culture the equation of ‘good neighborhoods’ with White ones” (1997: 274–75).
U.S. residential suburban areas continued to swell through the mid- to late twentieth century, enhanced significantly in the mid-1960s by processes of “White flight” from metropolitan areas that were increasingly subject to, or threatened by, federal and state school desegregation mandates. Here it is important to note that while the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was handed down in 1954, its broad enforcement remained limited for nearly a decade, and its requirements were generally not assumed to extend beyond the U.S. South. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed things considerably, as it provided for denial of federal educational funds to school districts continuing to discriminate on the basis of race. It also established the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in the Office of Civil Rights, an agency that took the lead in enforcing desegregation by initiating litigation against districts not responding to federal mandates. A string of Supreme Court decisions followed the Civil Rights Act (continuing through the early 1970s) that called for increasingly strict measures for school desegregation, including mandates to extend school integration requirements beyond the U.S. South to western and eastern states, and to expand the right of desegregated schooling to other “protected” minority groups, including Mexican Americans.4
This intensification of federal enforcement for desegregation, along with the extension of minority group entitlements to integrated education, had the effect of generating fervent backlash among segments of the White population in various areas of the country, particularly those who felt dislocated by the economic, political, and cultural shifts they believed to be a product of civil rights strategies.5 The result was massive protests, impassioned political lobbying, and a proliferation of state ballot measures meant to curb or dismantle desegregation efforts, often in open contradiction to federal court decisions in ongoing litigation (Orfield 1997). The ensuing racial-reactive atmosphere fostered the growth of a neoconservative political