Assignment 16- Jasir Rahman- Speech

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling was seen by many as a triumph for America, desegregating our schools and seemingly ensuring equality of education.  The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Indeed, the Civil Rights Project found that desegregation efforts have lost all of the additional progress made after 1967.  The root of the festering, inherently unequal system of education under which millions of underrepresented students attend, is that of housing. 

Integrated housing is key to creating diverse student bodies.  Districts in which people live determine who attends what school.  These districts, however, became racially homogenous because of 2 key reasons.  

First, is inherently racist housing policies.  African-American veterans of World War II were systematically denied the benefits of the GI Bill by the government, which would have provided a monthly housing allowance for veterans.  African-Americans were dishonorably discharged at much higher rates than their white counterparts, meaning they could not benefit. Many veterans who had faithfully fought for their country overseas returned home not to praise for their service, but to rocks, derogatory names, and lynchings, as they tried to access the benefits they had earned when they set foot on the battlefield.  

This trend of a lack of government support for African-Americans attempting to purchase housing is perpetuated today through the increasing trend of market-rate housing.  Leshnower explains that market-rate housing is housing that is an apartment that has no rent restrictions and is not affected by typical housing laws. Promoting market-rate housing comes at the expense of government subsidized, rent-controlled housing.  This is because American cities are running out of room to build new housing units, and so in order to build less regulated market-rate housing, public housing units have to be torn down. Indeed, Austen of the New York Times finds that since the 1990s, over 250,000 public housing units have been demolished and replaced with market-rate housing.  The issue is that market-rate housing doesn’t replace 1 for 1 the rent-controlled units. In Chicago, 15,000 public housing units were torn down and replaced with 1,000 market-rate units, thus displacing those who inhabited those 14,000 units that went unreplaced. Furthermore, because market-rate housing is geared towards higher socioeconomic brackets, rents increase as wealthier people move in, pushing predominantly black and brown communities to the periphery of society, further cementing segregation.

The second key issue is social segregation.  Throughout the country African-Americans were excluded from suburban communities and segregated into urban areas by those white residents who were already established in the area.  Douglas Massey, professor of Sociology at Princeton University, in no uncertain terms, found that as soon as African-Americans moved into the fringe of a white neighborhood, white residents would sell and move to the suburbs, thus further exacerbating spatial, social, and economic isolation of the African American population.  Urban riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led to President Lyndon Johnson’s expedient creation of the Kerner Commission, to identify the root cause of the violence. What they found was that the US was, “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” and this finding fast-tracked the passage of the Fair Housing Act, allowing African-Americans to sue on the basis of racial discrimination in housing.  While this was a step in the right direction, it did little to solve the actual problem. A 2009 study from the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that African-Americans faced discrimination 20% of the time they attempted to rent a home.

The result is inequitable education for minority students.  The amount of apartheid schools, schools where the student body is 99% minority status, has more than doubled since the height of desegregation efforts, 1988.  Unfortunately, Latino and Black students are more likely to attend schools that have inexperienced teachers and fewer resources like college prep programs that enable students to excel and attain post-secondary education that is vital to making a living in the United States.  Indeed, Black and Latino students are 5 times more likely to attend high poverty schools. Furthermore, the psychological impacts of segregation in schools has remained constant over the course of 70 years. The famous “Doll Tests” in which psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark used different colored dolls to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children, ultimately lead to the conclusion that segregation in schools led to a feeling of inferiority among black students.  In 2010, CNN commissioned a similar study, and the result is constant. Both white and black children are biased towards positive attributes being associated with whiteness, and negative attributes being associated with darkness.  

Integration is key to solving both of these problems.  A study that compared the outcomes of black siblings where one went to an integrated school and the other didn’t, found that those who went to an integrated school were more likely to graduate, and 22% less likely to be incarcerated.  It also found that these benefits spilled over and impacted their children as well. Furthermore, multiple studies have found that attending diverse schools lead to a dramatic decrease in discriminatory attitudes and prejudices.  

So, how do we integrate?  We first must tackle the housing issue.  Rent-controlled housing, which caps the amount a landlord can demand of a tenant, or housing vouchers, such as the Section 8 program, which partially pay for the housing costs of lower socioeconomic groups are a simple fix.  They allow for predominantly black and Latino communities to integrate into white affluent communities, in turn integrating the school system. However, landlords generally see rent-control as a poor investment, as they fear that tenants won’t be able to pay.  

A much more comprehensive and targeted solution is that of desegregated bussing systems.  Busing systems send children outside of their districts to other schools to directly combat segregation in schools.  The results speak for themselves. Remember the study I mentioned earlier about the siblings who went to different schools?  Those benefits were made possible by the busing system. However, the benefits of busing have been overshadowed by the political discourse shaped by the rhetoric of white parents and politicians who thought that exposure to minority students would mean exposure to illicit activities.  While they may have had the best of intentions, the end result was a systematic denial of better education to African-Americans and the segregation we see today.

In order to change the inequitable education system, we must examine the root cause of segregation itself.  Acknowledging and confronting the racist housing system that continues to plague the nation is vital to understanding the current system of segregation in our schools.

Bibliography

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Azoff, Rachel. “Is Mixed-Income Housing Really the Saving Grace of the Failed Public Housing Movement?” Multifamily Executive, 10 Aug. 2009, https://www.multifamilyexecutive.com/design-development/is-mixed-income-housing-really-the-saving-grace-of-the-failed-public-housing-movement_o.

Billante, Jill, and Chuck Hadad. “Study: White and Black Children Biased toward Lighter Skin.” CNN, CNN, 14 May 2010, https://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/13/doll.study/index.html.

Blakemore, Erin. “How the GI Bill's Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans.” A&E Television Networks, 21 June 2019, https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits.

Leshnower, Ron. “Learn About Market-Rate Housing and Finding An Affordable Apartment.” The Spruce, 19 Feb. 2019, https://www.thespruce.com/market-rate-apartment-155986.

Office for Civil Rights.  “KEY DATA HIGHLIGHTS ON EQUITY AND OPPORTUNITY GAPS IN OUR NATION’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS.”  US Department of Education, 28 October 2016, https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/2013-14-first-look.pdf.

Orfield, Gary, and Erica Frankenburg. “Brown at 60: Great Progress, a Long Retreat and an Uncertain Future.” UCLA, 14 May 2014, https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/brown-at-60-great-progress-a-long-retreat-and-an-uncertain-future.

Potter, Halley, et al. “The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms.” The Century Foundation, 29 Apr. 2019, https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomically-and-racially-integrated-schools-and-classrooms/?session=1.

The Atlas. “The Atlas: National Equity Atlas.” National Equity Atlas, 2016, https://nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/School_poverty.

“The Race Gap in High School Honors Classes.” National Journal, 11 Dec. 2014, https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/619333.

Trifun, Natasha. “Residential Segregation after the Fair Housing Act.” American Bar Association, 1 Oct. 2009, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol36_2009/fall2009/residential_segregation_after_the_fair_housing_act/.

Zamora, Amanda. “Discussion: School Resegregation 60 Years After Brown v. Board.” ProPublica, 13 May 2014, https://www.propublica.org/getinvolved/revisitingbrown-resegregating-u.s.-schools-60-years-after-brown-v.-board.