Last week, in response to our current racial discussions following the unjust killing of George Floyd, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted, “It’s time for Connecticut to desegregate our schools.”
As someone who chose to attend an integrated high school, I know firsthand that the benefits of integrated schools are not only numerous but also desperately needed during these times when racial tensions are high.
Currently, schools are almost as segregated today as they were in the years following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Brown overturned the previous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896 that allowed schools to be separate as long as they were “equal.” If we want to improve race relations in America, we need to start a conversation on how we can successfully integrate schools to stop us from continuing to backpedal toward the days of 1896 when segregated schools were the norm.
The opposition to integrated schools has been entrenched in many white parents when it comes to where they send their children to school. Currently, white parents have successfully avoided sending their children to school with black children by moving to predominantly white school districts or by spending the equivalent of college tuition rates to send them to predominantly white private schools. The conversation around school integration has largely been around forced busing, which has been a controversial issue in our past and still is today, as this year’s Democratic primary debates showed. White parents have traditionally used “busing” as their excuse for opposing racially integrated schools, rather than admitting their true feelings about it.
Additionally, white parents’ opposition to integrated schools is relatively bipartisan. Take a look at heavily Democratic areas such as Howard and Montgomery counties in Maryland, where members of those communities protested their schools being integrated and complained that black children “won’t be able to keep up” with the white students in their schools. Likewise, in a heavily Republican part of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, community members have been fighting for years to create a new city to allow their white children to attend their own separated school district.
Clearly, white people still have a problem with sending their children to school with black children, but we also have to understand that Americans are uniquely stubborn when it comes to the government telling us what to do and that we’re much better voluntarily doing things out of the goodness of our hearts. Therefore, when we approach the conversation of school integration, we are wasting our time by debating how we should lawfully enforce it. Forcing white parents to send their children to school with black children by law just isn’t going to work. Instead, we need to convince white parents that they should voluntarily want to send their children to school with black children.
When I was in eighth grade, I was fortunate enough to have the awareness to look around my mostly white neighborhood school and want something different. I was also lucky enough to have parents who raised me in a way that encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone and drive 30 miles a day to attend an urban Catholic high school with students from all backgrounds. Attending a school with students who didn’t look like me would tremendously shape my view of the world for the better. In thinking of our currently segregated school systems across America, I am deeply concerned for the millions of students missing out on the lifelong benefits of integrated schools.
Research has shown that diverse schools are beneficial for all students. Stronger academic outcomes, civic and social-emotional benefits, and more equitably funded schools are a few of the many benefits that should make integrated schools desirable for all parents. If you want to prepare your child for the diverse America he or she will soon live and operate in, then there is no better way to do so then by sending him or her to school with children from all different backgrounds and races.
Now, with any well-intended proposal such as school integration, it is imperative that we also acknowledge the unintended consequences. For black communities, education reformer Chris Stewart notes that past school integration efforts have led to “our teachers fired. Our principals demoted. Our children handed over wholesale to an education establishment that had no reason to love them.”
In any school integration plan or proposal discussed, we have to learn from our past and actively ensure that black students aren’t neglected, disciplined more, and underestimated by their white teachers. We also have to discuss ways of increasing the number of black teachers, as research shows how all students benefit from having a black teacher.
As we have seen, government-enforced desegregation of our schools has rarely worked in the past. Instead, we need to change the culture in our country where parents will begin to choose to send their children to diverse schools. For white people, it is not enough to dress up in kente cloth, post a black square on your Instagram, or read anti-racism books out of white guilt. If we truly want to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of “black boys and black girls joining hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” then we have to start by white parents wanting to send their white children to school with black children.
Ryan Hooper is a high school government teacher in Baltimore.
