Confronting Suburban School Resegregation in California. Clayton A. Hurd
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While the White resistance/deserved segregation framework emphasizes the resistance of privileged White citizens to the vision, expectations, and implications of the mandates set forth in Brown v. Board of Education, the fact is that significant voices of critique have also come from within the very minority communities that the Brown ruling was intended to vindicate. These voices of resistance go back to the period before and during the original Brown proceedings when, for example, Black Nationalist leaders spoke strongly against the court’s vision for school integration based on what they regarded as the incomplete understanding of racism and race relations on which the decision was based, and the limited view of racial domination and racial justice that it appeared to reflect (Peller 1996). Because the Brown agenda was framed primarily as a struggle against pathological or psychological manifestations of racist attitudes or behaviors, the court assumed that overcoming prejudice and arriving at racial justice could best be achieved through the social practice of equal treatment. Such a practice would require the establishment of a color-blind position, or a sort of race neutrality within public schools, in which all students would have access to an objectively defined, racially integrated form of “quality education” based on neutral standards of professionalism and universal testing paradigms that could serve as effective and appropriate measures of schooling equality and individual ability (Peller 1996: 131).
What Black Nationalist leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael found problematic about this particular framing of the integrationist project was the manner in which it diverted attention away from how race and class backgrounds and experiences have structured socioeconomic, political, and educational opportunities over time, eluding consideration of how racism has operated within a historical context related to centuries of unequal distribution of social, economic, and political opportunities and through normative practices that have served to produce systematic White privilege. Viewing racism as primarily a “problem of psychology” evaded not only issues of class exploitation and struggle but also trivialized and mystified the deeper sources of racial inequality that have never been located solely, or even primarily, in individual actions or prejudices but in a racialized social order sustained through enduring systems of hierarchically organized racial inequality that include de facto occupational, residential, and school segregation (Omi and Winant 1994: 133; see also Lipsitz 1998).12
The Black Nationalist critique of the Brown agenda was not a rejection of integration per se, but a rejection of the particular assimilationist terms under which that integration was expected to take place. Brown promoted a form of integration that was assimilative in nature, based on the dominant paradigm of citizenship and belonging in the United States, which asks all citizens regardless of race, class, or cultural background and experience to assimilate to “American culture” by conforming to normative cultural and linguistic practices, and to concede the use of nonstandard or native linguistic and cultural practices in the public realm. Against the Brown court’s idea that the absence of race consciousness in schools would allow fair, impersonal criteria to inform merit-based decision making and assure “quality education,” the Black Nationalist perspective “characterized the norms that constituted the neutral, impersonal, a-racial, and professional character of school integration as particular cultural assumptions of a specific economic class of Whites” (Peller 1996: 140). In doing so, they sought to deny the very possibility and feasibility of an “ideal,” objective, neutral, and skills-oriented “quality education”; instead, they meant to demystify it as the arbitrary establishment of middle-class, Anglo-American cultural practices and cultural capital as the preferred and rewarded norms of behavior, learning, and interaction within schools (see also Heath 1996; Kelley 1997).13 What was considered dangerous about an approach to desegregated schooling that dismissed as irrelevant—or, at worst, inferior—the cultural and linguistic resources, skills, and experiences of the non-White, non-middle class, was the manner in which it could serve to promote the supposition that cultural deficits explain low achievement, an assumption that was used to justify lowered expectations for working-class racial and ethnic minority students and to encourage disparagement of racial minority group status in ways that have promoted student disengagement from normative educational models (see Foley 1997; McDermott 1997; Valenzuela 1999). The fears articulated by Black Nationalist leaders were that assimilative integration, in practice, would serve as a “subterfuge for White supremacy” (Peller 1996: 139) in which “successfully” desegregated environments would become settings for resegregation due to tracking practices, ability grouping, and expectation of Anglo conformity for equal access, participation, and respect in important schooling activities.
Dangers of White Normativity in Racially and Socioeconomically Diverse Schooling Contexts
Unfortunately, these early concerns about the dangers of assimilative integration have, to a large degree, been realized in public schools in the United States up to the present day. An expansive body of ethnographic literature has been exploring the negative forms and consequences of White normativity in U.S. public schools, including attention to how discourse and practices of “color-blindness” can lead to subtle forms of discrimination and privilege that aid in the production of unequal schooling experiences and outcomes (Kailin 1999; Lewis 2003); how Whiteness can come to function as a status associated with giftedness and privileged entitlement, disproportionally channeling educational resources to White students (Fine 1991; Staiger 2004); and how everyday racialization processes in educational settings can impact student identifications and social affiliations in ways consequential to school success (Bettie 2003; Chesler, Peet, and Sevig 2003; Davidson 1996; Hurd 2008; Olsen 1997; Perry 2002).
This notion of white normativity draws from a more general concept within the social sciences of normative cultural practice, a term that describes a set of dominant expectations, values, principles, and modes of representation that tend to guide interactions within public institutional settings in the United States. Normative whiteness, as Pamela Perry has argued, draws from a set of ideological understandings that, although broadly shared within the population, tend to be linked to particular ways of understanding history, citizenship, notions of self and other, and the very concept of culture itself (2001: 61). The notion of normative whiteness, to paraphrase Margaret Andersen, is less about bodies and skin color than about discursive and material practices that privilege and sustain the dominance of White imperial and middle-class Eurocentric worldviews (2003: 29).
In the United States, two popular discourses underlie practices of White normativity and help account for the damaging forms they may take in racially and socioeconomically diverse schooling contexts, particularly—I will argue—in school settings shared by White and Latino students. The first is that of assimilationist integration which, while typically allowing for some level of public expression of culture and language by ethnic citizens, tends to limit toleration to safe, “folk” genres such as festivals, cultural celebrations, ethnic restaurants, and some forms of media (Baquedano-López 2000; Hill 1999). Strong public expression of cultural and linguistic diversity beyond those contexts—for example, in institutional settings like public schools, workplaces, and voting booths—is often taken to be threatening to national unity and encouraging of ethnic separatism. A second pillar of normative whiteness, which finds justification in the same liberal democratic principles that support the assimilationist perspective, is the racial ideology of color blindness. From a color-blind perspective, the role of multicultural public schooling is to transcend racial consciousness through race neutrality and the social principle of equal treatment, thereby reaffirming the meritocratic idea in U.S. society that economic and social mobility are possible for all those who will work hard and conform to norms and habits of those already in power.
Problems arise in racially and ethnically diverse public schools when these foundational discourses of normative whiteness find themselves at odds with a range of common strategies and practices used by self-proclaimed “multicultural” schools to pursue their inclusive educational missions. These include, for example, racial and cultural pride activities and events, cultural commemorations, ethnic and cultural clubs, and various “ethnic studies” curricular offerings. The result is a certain schizophrenia inherent in many multiracial, socioeconomically diverse schools today, which says that the promotion of multiculturalism is good, but only if it takes noncritical forms that do not interrupt the assimilative