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

  What difference does it make now? For people of color, living in a hypersegregated community increases one’s exposure to the disadvantages associated with concentrated poverty and reduces access to the benefits associated with affluent communities (e.g., higher rates of voting, more political influence, lower rates of crime and delinquency, greater involvement with cultural and educational institutions, healthier lifestyles), regardless of your own socioeconomic status. Sociologists Massey and Tannen conclude the following:

  Our focused analysis of neighborhood trends in hypersegregated areas further demonstrated the power of segregation not only to compromise the neighborhood circumstances of poor African-Americans but also to limit the ability of affluent Black residents to improve their geographic position in urban society.… Not only was the quality of neighborhoods inhabited by affluent Blacks lower in absolute terms compared to their affluent counterparts across metropolitan areas generally, but also their neighborhood circumstances improved little relative to those experienced by the very poorest of Whites. These findings confirm what social scientists have long known: Residential segregation continues to be the structural linchpin in America’s system of racial stratification. [italics mine]24

  In everyday terms, Daria Roithmayr explains that racial segregation limits access to the helpful social networks needed for successful employment. Neighbors connect each other (or each other’s children) to employment opportunities and other needed resources. Keeping groups separated means that community helpfulness is not shared across racial lines. Because of residential segregation, economic disadvantage and racial disadvantage are inextricably linked.25

  Acknowledging the now centuries-long persistence of residential segregation and its consequence, school segregation, goes a long way toward explaining why the answer to the first question posed to me is still “Yes, the Black kids are still sitting together.” The social context in which students of color and White students enter academic environments together (in those few places where they do) is still a context in which their lived experiences are likely to have been quite different from each other, and in which racial stereotyping is still likely to be an inhibiting factor in their cross-group interactions.

  Change You Can Believe In?

  That said, isn’t anything better? In his commencement address at Howard University on May 7, 2016, President Barack Obama offered an answer to that question. Speaking to a largely Black audience, he highlighted the ways the world has improved since his own college graduation in 1983, including in the area of race relations. Here’s an excerpt of that speech: “In my inaugural address, I remarked that just 60 years earlier, my father might not have been served in a D.C. restaurant—at least not certain of them. There were no black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Very few black judges.… We’re no longer only entertainers, we’re producers, studio executives. No longer small business owners—we’re CEOs, we’re mayors, representatives, Presidents of the United States.”26

  Of course, President Obama was correct that there has been positive, meaningful social change in our lifetimes—certainly in the years since I was born in 1954—but if we focus specifically on the twenty-year period from 1997 to 2017, we must acknowledge some setbacks beyond just the stubborn persistence of neighborhood and school segregation. There are three I want to highlight here: the anti–affirmative action backlash of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the economic collapse of 2008 known as the Great Recession, and the phenomenon known as mass incarceration.

  The first of these setbacks—the anti–affirmative action backlash of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—has had significant impact on Black, Latinx, and American Indian access to the best-resourced public colleges and universities. The case of higher education in California is a telling example. In 1996 California voters approved an initiative, known as Proposition 209, that prohibited “preferential treatment” based on “race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin” in employment, education, and contracting programs, effectively ending all state-run affirmative action programs. The California legislation inspired other states to place a ban on affirmative action in state-run programs. As of 2014, Washington, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma had done so.27

  In the case of California, the Proposition 209 initiative, which took effect in 1998, had a devastating effect on the enrollment of Black and Latinx students at the two leading public universities in California, UCLA and UC Berkeley. African American undergraduate enrollment dropped at UCLA by more than 37 percent, from 5.6 percent of the freshman class to 3.5 percent. Almost two decades later, the proportion of African American freshman students enrolling at UCLA remains below the pre–Proposition 209 levels. At UC Berkeley, African American undergraduate enrollment has fluctuated between approximately 3 percent and 4 percent between 1998 and 2014, far below the pre–Proposition 209 level, which was approximately 6.5 percent. Similarly Latinx undergraduate enrollment also fell sharply in the wake of Proposition 209 at both institutions. At UC Berkeley, Latinx enrollment dropped from 16.9 percent of the freshman class to 8.2 percent—a staggering 52 percent decline—in the years between 1995 and 1998. Enrollment of American Indian students also plummeted. As of 2014, American Indian undergraduate enrollment at UCLA and UC Berkeley is still 45 percent lower than it was when Proposition 209 went into effect.28 The decrease in students of color has led to a greater sense of isolation among those who do enroll.29

  A similar impact was seen in Michigan following the passage of its own version of Proposition 209. Known as Proposal 2, the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) became law in 2006. As in California, the proposal banned all affirmative action programs that gave “preferential treatment” to people of color in state contracting, employment, and higher education. Before Proposal 2 took effect, underrepresented students of color made up 13 percent of the University of Michigan’s total enrollment. By 2014, the overall percentage had dropped to 11.5 percent of total enrollment. The figures are even worse for African Americans, with undergraduate enrollment dropping more than a third, from 7 percent in 2006 to approximately 4.5 percent in 2014. Ironically, this decrease occurred even as the total percentage of college-aged Blacks in Michigan increased from 16 to 19 percent.30

  The California and Michigan flagship institutions have found that without taking race in consideration, it is very difficult to achieve representative levels of diversity across the higher education landscape, despite the demographic changes of the twenty-first century. Recognition of that difficulty seemed to play a role in the most recent Supreme Court decision regarding affirmative action programs in higher education. On June 23, 2016, the court ruled on the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which challenged UT Austin’s use of race as one factor among many in a holistic review of applicants. To the surprise of many court watchers, the Supreme Court ruled on the side of the university. Writing the majority opinion for the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy praised Texas for having offered a reasoned, principled explanation of its policy, but also warned that the court’s decision “does not necessarily mean the university may rely on that same policy without refinement” in the future, reminding us all of the still-unsteady ground on which current affirmative action programs stand.31

  The second setback—the economic collapse of 2008—shook the ground for Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it had a disproportionately disastrous effect for many Black and Latinx families. In their sobering 2009 Huffington Post essay titled “The Destruction of the Black Middle Class,” Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad wrote:

  After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income whites to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wea
lth from subprime loans, while blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the “greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history.”32

  Not only did many families of color lose their homes in the Great Recession, they also lost their jobs. Disparate unemployment rates continue, despite the national economic recovery. At this writing, in the third quarter of 2016, the White unemployment rate is 4.4 percent, but for African Americans it is 8.5 percent (4 percent for Asians and 5.8 percent for Latinxs).33 “The racial wealth gap between whites and people of color is the highest it has been in 25 years; 2014 estimates by the Pew Research Center put the gap in net worth between African Americans and Whites at 1,300 percent and that between Whites and Hispanics at 1,000 percent.”34 The economic disparities translate into educational disparities as well. College access is much more difficult when families have had little opportunity to accumulate savings and have no real estate assets against which to borrow. According to data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the percentage of Black students whose families had nothing to contribute to their college education (in financial aid terms, an “expected family contribution of zero”) went from 41.6 percent in 2008 to 60 percent in 2012.35 For the Black elites that President Obama mentioned in his Howard University commencement speech, the last twenty years may have represented an improvement in their economic circumstance, but for the vast majority of Black and Latinx families it has been a downward slide.

  It is worth noting that some White families have been sliding, too. The number of White families with “an expected family contribution of zero” went from 18.7 percent in 2008 to 29 percent in 2012.36 The poverty rate among working-class Whites rose three percentage points, from 8 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2011, still less than half of the poverty rate of working-class communities of color (23 percent in 2011). Nevertheless, the gap between White and Black poverty is closing, due to the declining fortunes of Whites in that sector of the economy.37 That fact is fueling both economic anxiety and anger among Whites, as evidenced among some of the White voters supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 presidential election.

  The third setback of the late-twentieth century and nearly two decades of the twenty-first century that we must acknowledge is the impact of mass incarceration. Historian Carol Anderson puts the phenomenon of mass incarceration in a particular context in her well-documented book White Rage when she makes the case that since the end of slavery in 1865, the prevailing White reaction to Black social and political gains has been an effort to push back those advances and regain social control. For example, following the end of the Civil War, there was a period of reformation in the South that included the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau to help those newly released from bondage. Blacks were given the right to vote, and some were elected to Southern state governments. Many social reforms, including the establishment of public schools, were instituted during that period. However, there was also massive White resistance from the former Confederates, which became violent with the rise of the KKK. As Northern law enforcers eventually withdrew from the South (marking the end of Reconstruction), White supremacists reasserted control and “took back the South” through the institution of Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of Black voters. Slavery was replaced with the system of exploitation known as sharecropping and the use of lynching as a means of social intimidation designed to enforce racial subordination.38 More than four thousand racial-terror lynchings took place across twelve southern states between 1877 and 1950.39 When, during the Great Migration (1915–1970), more than six million African Americans escaped the Jim Crow South, thereby threatening the southern economy so dependent on their cheap labor, White southerners used both legal and illegal means to try to stop their exodus.40

  Similarly, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case was met with strenuous White opposition in cities across both the South and North until federal intervention in the 1970s brought change, most of which has now been undone by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. Likewise, the advances of the civil rights era, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, evoked White resistance, particularly in the South, and triggered what has been called the “southern strategy,” an effort by national politicians like Richard Nixon to court White voters (in both the South and the North) unhappy about Black gains not by making specific reference to race but rather by promising things like “law and order,” “welfare reform,” and “school choice,” alluding to race by association without actually using racial language to “trigger Pavlovian anti-black responses.”41 Sometimes called “dog whistle politics,” this use of coded language and images taps into and reinforces stereotypes. In the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president, the “War on Drugs” became the coded language, and young Black and Latinx men became the targets of aggressive stop-and-search policing and harsh mandatory sentences, even for first-time offenders. These policies and the criminal justice practices that followed from them escalated under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.42

  Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, describes the result in powerful terms. She writes:

  More African American adults are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.… The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who have defied the odds and risen to power, fame, and fortune. For those left behind, especially those within prison walls, the celebration of racial triumph in America must seem a tad premature. More black men are imprisoned today than at any other moment in our nation’s history. More are disenfranchised today than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race. Young black men today may be just as likely to suffer discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits, and jury service as a black man in the Jim Crow era—discrimination that is perfectly legal, because it is based on one’s criminal record. This is the new normal, the new racial equilibrium.43

  And while Alexander highlights the plight of Black men, similarly disturbing statistics exist for Black women. Though many more men are in prison than women, the growth rate for female imprisonment between 1980 and 2014 exceeds that for male imprisonment by more than 50 percent. According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, Black women represent 23 percent of the 1.2 million women under the supervision of the criminal justice system, though only 13 percent of the female population overall. In 2014, the imprisonment rate for African American women (109 per 100,000) was more than twice the rate of imprisonment for White women (53 per 100,000), while Hispanic women were incarcerated at 1.2 times the rate of white women (64 per 100,000).44

  This dramatic increase in incarceration is not due to a rising crime rate. Rather, it can be traced back directly to changes in drug sentencing laws and policies. Since the official beginning of the War on Drugs during the Reagan administration of the 1980s, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses has skyrocketed, from forty-one thousand in 1980 to nearly a half million in 2014. Furthermore, tough sentencing laws such as mandatory minimums keep many people convicted of drug offenses in prison for longer periods of time. In 1986, people released after serving time for a federal drug offense had spent a little less than two years—an average of twenty-two months—in prison. By 2004, the average length of sentence had almost tripled, so that people convicted on federal drug offenses were expected to serve sixty-two months—more than five years—in prison. At the federal level, people incarcerated on a drug conviction make up half the prison population. At the state level, the number of people in prison for drug offenses has increased tenfold since 1980. Most of these people have no record of violent offenses and are not major player
s in the drug trade.45

  The negative social, emotional, and economic impact on families torn asunder by mass incarceration cannot be underestimated. The number of parents of minor children held in the nation’s prisons increased by 79 percent between 1991 and midyear 2007.46 Black and Latinx children are especially impacted, since 90 percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states are Black or Latinx, despite the fact that the majority of illegal drug users and dealers in the United States are White. Alexander highlights the impact of this racial disparity in drug enforcement on Black families. She writes, “A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The absence of black fathers across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites.”47

  These statistics are depressing, and perhaps you are saying to yourself, as I say to myself, “Surely something has changed for the better in the last twenty years!” Indeed, if there is one thing that might suggest there has been a positive change in race relations in the twenty-first century, it might be the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

  The Election of President Barack Obama

  I spent Election Night 2008 with hundreds of students gathered at Spelman College, along with faculty, staff, administrators, alumnae, and city leaders, to await the results of our historic presidential election. It was a remarkable evening in which we collectively reflected on the achievements of the past, the success of the present, and the hopes for the future. Civil rights icon Reverend Joseph Lowery spoke to the crowd and powerfully described the 2008 election process as a “transformational moment in which the United States is being reborn,” a moment in which the politics of fear and division was giving way to the politics of hope and inclusion. When the announcement of Senator Barack Obama’s victory came, the cheers and tears in the swell of the largely African American crowd at Spelman were mirrored in the faces captured by news broadcasters at the multiracial, multiethnic, and multigenerational gatherings in Grant Park in Chicago, in Times Square in New York, and at the gates of the White House in Washington. Surely it was a night to remember. The headline of the Philadelphia Inquirer captured the early sentiment: CHANGE HAS COME TO AMERICA!48 Regardless of political affiliation, for a moment at least we could relish the social significance of the success of President-Elect Obama, the first African American man to overcome the most symbolic of racial barriers, just forty years after Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. articulated his dream that one day his children—Barack Obama’s generation—would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.