Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1997, 2017 Beverly Daniel Tatum

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  Originally published in hardcover and ebook by Basic Books in September 1997

  Third trade paperback edition: July 2017

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tatum, Beverly Daniel, author.

  Title: “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” : and other conversations about race / Beverly Daniel Tatum.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, 2017. | “Fully revised and updated”—Provided by publisher. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014766 (print) | LCCN 2017017216 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541616585 (ebook) | ISBN 9780465060689 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Race identity. | Whites—Race identity—United States. | African American children—Psychology. | African American youth—Psychology. | Whites—United States—Psychology. | Race awareness in adolescence—United States. | Intercultural communication—United States. | Communication and culture—United States. | Communication—Social aspects—United States. | United States—Race relations. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies.

  Classification: LCC E185.625 (ebook) | LCC E185.625 .T38 2017 (print) | DDC

  305.800973—dc23

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-06068-9 (2017 paperback); 978-1-54161-658-5 (ebook)

  E3-20170801-JV-NF

  In remembrance of my parents,

  Robert and Catherine Daniel,

  whose love and encouragement lives on

  When I dare to be powerful,

  to use my strength in the service of my vision,

  then it becomes less important whether or not I am afraid.

  —AUDRE LORDE

  PROLOGUE

  “Why Are All the Black Kids Still Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race in the Twenty-First Century

  WHEN I TOLD PEOPLE THAT I WAS WORKING ON A TWENTIETH-ANNIVERSARY edition of my 1997 book, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race, the typical response came in the form of a question, or sometimes two: “Is that still happening? Are things getting better?” A quick glance across the cafeteria in the average racially mixed US high school or college will tell you that the answer to the first question is usually yes. What, if anything, does that tell us about the answer to the second question, “Are things getting better?” What does “better” look like? That is a more complicated question. What has changed, for better or worse, in the last twenty years? What is the implication for how we understand ourselves and each other in reference to our racial identities? And, if we are dissatisfied with the way things are, what can we do to change it?

  I wrote the first version of this book in 1996, in the closing years of the twentieth century. Now, almost two decades into the twenty-first, it seems we are still struggling with what W. E. B. Du Bois identified in 1906 as the “problem of the color line,” even though the demographic composition of that color line has changed quite a bit since then. In his provocatively titled 2016 book, Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority, author Steve Phillips highlights the speed with which the American population is shifting. He writes, “Each day, the size of the U.S. population increases by more than 8,000 people, and nearly 90 percent of that growth consists of people of color [emphasis in original],” a consequence of differential rates of birth, death, and patterns of immigration. The numbers are pretty remarkable when you consider that in 1950 the total US population was nearly 90 percent White. But many members of that 1950s population are now elderly, and as the older White population is passing away, the White birth rate is not sufficient to replace them at the same population percentage. Add to this the fact of immigration. The majority of people immigrating legally to the US are people of color, coming from places like Asia, Africa, and Latin America, reflecting the fact that the majority of the world’s population is of color. When immigration numbers are added to the net increase from births, “the bottom line is that each and every day, 7,261 people of color are added to the U.S. population, in contrast to the White growth of 1,053 people.”1 Indeed, the 2014 school year marked the first time in US history that the majority of elementary and secondary schoolchildren were children of color—Black, Latinx,2 Asian, or American Indian.3

  New Faces, Same Places

  Though much of what has historically been written about race relations in the United States describes the traditional Black-White racial binary—a function of the legacy of slavery, the African American struggle for civil rights, and the fact that in the twentieth century Blacks represented the largest minority group—it is important to note that in the twenty-first century, people of Latin American descent (referred to by the US Census Bureau as Hispanics) are the largest population of color in the nation. According to the Census Bureau, while Blacks compose 13 percent of the US population, Hispanics are now 17.6 percent.4 Growing faster than the Hispanic population is the Asian American community. Less than 1 percent of the population in 1965, by 2011 the Asian population had grown to approximately 6 percent of the US population, now the fastest-growing racial group in the country. Within the broad umbrella category of Asian Americans, the six largest groups by country of origin are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, and Japanese Americans, together representing 83 percent of the total Asian population in the US.5

  While Muslims cannot be accurately defined in terms of one racial or ethnic group, because Muslims come from many countries of origin and not just the Middle East, it seems fitting to include current statistics about the Muslim population because some of the dynamics we see regarding racial difference during the last two decades apply here as well. Certainly since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there has been an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment in the US that should not be ignored. The Pew Research Center estimates that there were approximately 3.3 million Muslims of all ages living in the United States in 2015, representing about 1 percent of the total US population. The Muslim population is expected to double by 2050, half of that projected growth the result of immigration.6

  Also of note is the growth in the population described as multiracial. In the year 2000, the United States Census Bureau began allowing people to choose more than one racial category to describe the
mselves. Since then, the nation’s multiracial population has grown significantly. The number of White and Black biracial Americans more than doubled, while the population of adults with a White and Asian background increased by 87 percent. According to a report of the Pew Research Center, “multiracial Americans are at the cutting edge of social and demographic change in the U.S.—young, proud, tolerant and growing at a rate three times as fast as the population as a whole.” Indeed, the percentage of multiracial babies has risen from 1 percent in 1970 to 10 percent in 2013.7

  Clearly our national diversity is growing rapidly, yet old patterns of segregation persist, most notably in schools and neighborhoods. More than sixty years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in every region of the country except the West, our public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1980, as measured by the percentage of all Black students who are attending schools that are “90–100% non-White,” with the highest rates of school segregation in the Northeast. Though the South made rapid progress toward school desegregation in the late 1960s and 1970s, typically in response to court orders and other federal pressure, the Northeast did not budge much, and patterns of de facto segregation in the Northeast continue to rise slowly but steadily, such that today more than 50 percent of Black students in the Northeast attend schools that are classified as “90–100% non-White.”8 Nationwide, nearly 75 percent of Black students today attend so-called majority-minority schools, and 38 percent attend schools with student bodies that are 10 percent or less White. Similarly large numbers of Latinx students, approximately 80 percent, attend schools where students of color are in the majority, and more than 40 percent attend schools where the White population is less than 10 percent of the student body. Both Black and Latinx students are much more likely than White students to attend a school where 60 percent or more of their classmates are living in poverty, as measured by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs. Separate remains unequal as schools with concentrated poverty and racial segregation are still likely to have less-experienced teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, inadequate facilities, and fewer classroom resources.9

  A series of key Supreme Court decisions during the three decades between 1974 and 2007 dramatically reduced the number of implementation methods available to communities engaged in school desegregation by eliminating strategies such as cross-district busing, dismantling local court supervision of desegregation plans, and limiting use of race-based admissions to ensure diversity in magnet school programs.10 As these options for desegregation have been curtailed by court rulings, the number of intensely segregated schools with zero to 10 percent White enrollment has more than tripled.11 Students are, once again, predominantly assigned to schools based on where they live, and to the extent that neighborhoods are segregated, the schools remain so.

  When we talk about residential segregation, we inevitably find that we are talking about not only race but also class. Certainly income matters when you are looking for housing. But we can’t overlook the way housing patterns have been shaped historically by race-based policies and practices, such as racially restrictive real estate covenants, racial steering by real estate agents, redlining, and other discriminatory practices by mortgage lenders. That history includes the use by many White homeowners’ associations of physical threats and violence to keep unwanted people of color out of their neighborhoods.

  In her 2014 book Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage, legal scholar Daria Roithmayr succinctly reminds us of that exclusionary history. Describing practices that originated in Chicago in the first quarter of the twentieth century, she details how regional practices became national law and federal policy:

  In a crucial historical moment that would pave the way for the rest of the country, the [Chicago Real Estate Board] put in place an ethics code provision that prohibited brokers from selling to buyers who threatened to disrupt the racial composition of the neighborhood. The move was so effective that the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) adopted an identical provision. Now brokers would have to risk their careers to sell across racial lines—state commissions were authorized by state law to revoke the state licenses of those brokers who violated this provision.12

  NAREB not only adopted the ethics code provision but also copied the Chicago use of the racially restrictive covenant, a legal instrument that served to prevent individual White homeowners from selling or leasing their property to Black residents, and spread the practice nationwide. For nearly three decades, these practices were not only legal but undergirded by federal policy.

  The policies of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) all converged to establish redlining as a national practice. “The most important factor encouraging white suburbanization and reinforcing the segregation of blacks was the FHA requirement for an ‘unbiased,’ professional appraisal of insured properties, which naturally included a rating of the neighborhood.”13 Using a coding system originally created by the HOLC, Black neighborhoods received a score of four, the lowest rating, and were coded as red. Those areas deemed at risk of becoming Black neighborhoods received a rating of three and were labeled “hazardous.” As a matter of policy, the FHA loans went toward the purchase of homes in the top two neighborhood rating categories, “new and homogeneous” and “expected to remain stable.” In effect, the federal loans were issued to White families to buy homes in new suburban neighborhoods that were all White and in older White neighborhoods that were expected to remain homogeneous. Private lenders took on the same redlining practices of the federal government, making it very difficult for Black families to obtain loans for property in the neighborhoods to which they were being confined. “The lack of loan capital flowing into minority areas made it impossible for owners to sell their homes, leading to steep declines in property values and a pattern of disrepair, deterioration, vacancy and abandonment.”14 The racially restrictive covenants that served to keep Black people from moving into White residential neighborhoods were officially endorsed by the FHA in the late 1940s and maintained until 1950, even though the Supreme Court declared such covenants unconstitutional in 1948.15

  The legacy of these policies and practices lives on in the present as past housing options enhance or impede the accumulation of home equity and eventually the intergenerational transmission of wealth. And though such policies are now illegal at the federal, state, and local levels, evidence suggests they haven’t been eliminated in practice. In 2006 the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) released the results of a multiyear, multicity investigation of real estate practices using paired teams of testers (White and African American, or White and Latinx) that were matched in terms of housing needs, financial qualifications, and employment history. Eighty-seven percent of the time the testers were steered to neighborhoods on the basis of race and/or national origin. In most cases, Whites were shown homes in primarily White neighborhoods, African Americans were shown homes in primarily African American neighborhoods, and Latinx buyers were shown homes in primarily Latinx neighborhoods.16

  To the extent there is progress toward Black-White racial integration, it is most apparent in communities where the total Black population is relatively small and of relatively high socioeconomic status and there is a military base or university in the region.17 My family and I lived in a place like that for twenty years—Northampton, Massachusetts. While these characteristics do not describe the communities where the majority of Black people live, it is worth noting that Black families have been moving out of the inner cities in large numbers. Demographer William Frey notes that by 2010, as the result of accelerated “Black flight,” more Blacks lived in the suburbs than in the cities of the biggest metropolitan regions.18

  Contemporary surveys of racial attitudes among Whites indicate that the larger the hypothetical Black population in an area, the more likely White
respondents are to express discomfort about living in the same neighborhood.19 The behavioral result of such attitudes is that in those cities that still have large urban Black populations—places like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee—progress toward residential integration has been quite limited. According to the 2010 census tract data, roughly a third of all Black metropolitan residents live in extremely segregated, or what researchers call “hypersegregated,” neighborhoods.

  A similar pattern is visible among Latinx families in the two largest Latinx communities—New York and Los Angeles—where nearly 20 percent are in hypersegregated neighborhoods. However, Latinx residential patterns do vary based on factors such as country of origin, recency of immigration, and skin color. New Latinx immigrants are likely to live in highly segregated communities, and those who are darker-skinned (many Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, for example) also tend to live in segregated neighborhoods, often in or adjacent to African American neighborhoods.20 Those who are lighter-skinned (many Cubans and South Americans, such as Argentineans, for example) may self-identify racially as White and are more likely to live in areas with non-Hispanic Whites.

  Discussing the housing patterns of American Indians and Alaska Natives is difficult because of the group’s relatively small population and the fact that many still live on rural American Indian reservations and in Alaska Native villages. It is estimated that 34 percent of the 4.1 million American Indians and Alaska Natives (1.5 percent of the total US population) live outside metropolitan areas.21 Of all groups of color, Asian Americans are the least segregated from Whites, though there is variation in that pattern as well. Recent immigrants are more likely to be concentrated in ethnic enclaves than those who have been in the US for several generations.22 Not surprisingly, of all racial groups, Whites are the most isolated. They are the most likely to live in racially homogeneous communities and the least likely to come into contact with people racially different from themselves.23