Is it the Government’s Job to Prevent Resegregation?

BY GRACE PORTELANCE

Most modern, rational people believe that laws segregating a population based on race or class are morally wrong. Most people also believe that no law should tell people where they must or must not live. However, preventing concentrations of homogenous populations was and continues to be a focus of social engineering efforts of the federal and state governments—and for good reasons. Diversity can create a more tolerant and open-minded community. The compelling goal of diversity led to a huge desegregation effort in the mid to late 1900s, a movement that went beyond removing legal barriers and delved into restructuring communities. The simplest and most effective way to do so was through schools—as the mantra goes, start ‘em young. As simple as assigning each student to a school of the government’s choosing, this method was a confident step towards cultural diversity. Ending lawful segregation in the 1960s and ‘70s was fairly effective; though the dream of complete equality was obviously not achieved, the government was making an intentional and concerted effort to reduce centuries-old divides. However, as the years passed, desegregation efforts faltered and soon the aggressive plans that were restructuring communities and schools ended. The effects slowed and then reversed— while from 1964 to 1988 the percentage of African-American students educated in a school with a 90-100% minority student body declined from 68% to 32%, the figure rose to 38% by 2001. For Hispanic students, the percentage of children in almost solely minority-populated schools has nearly doubled from 1964 to 2001. This creates a difficult moral argument for those in legislative and community leader positions. While we can all agree (and there is substantial evidence to support this) that a diverse learning environment is superior for all involved, can we enforce it with law? While living and working with many types of people fosters growth and exploration, can we force this upon citizens?

The phenomenon of segregated communities is nothing new; I would place a considerable bet that you didn’t grow up in a community that boasted a perfect racial balance. The more likely scenario is that you grew up on a block that was predominantly, if not exclusively monoracial. Some of this is geographically based. The closer one lives to say, the Mexican border, the more likely it is that large amounts of people with Mexican heritage live there. Consider the disparity between the Latino population in the border state of New Mexico (47% of the total population) versus that of Vermont (less than 2% of the total population): is this morally wrong? Would it be more equal, more civilized, more developed to move people from state to state until each state has a better racial balance?

On such a large scale it would seem ridiculous to uproot millions of people at random in order to create this simplistic definition of “ balance.” However, on a smaller scale this type of control is fairly common, especially in an imperfectly balanced community like mine. I grew up in a neighborhood called Ballard, known for its role as a center for the seafaring community of Seattle. Though one of the fastest growing and largest neighborhoods in Seattle, Ballard has a huge ethnic Scandinavian population. We have parades for the Syttende Mai, we have a Nordic Heritage museum, and we have a lot of white people. My high school’s student body was close to 70% white. This majority is not as much the fault of exclusionary policies, or (until more recently) exclusionary costs of living, but the mere fact that it was the site of a huge amount of Scandinavian immigration.

This white majority contributed to the formation of policy concerning the racial mix of public schools. The Seattle School District once allowed students to apply to any public school in the district, using a series of factors called “tiebreakers” to determine who got in where. One of the most important of these was race. Those who would contribute to a more balanced population would be more likely to be admitted. This policy would affect few in areas where populations were close to the racial mix of Seattle’s student population (about 60% non-white, 40% white), but a huge tool in a community like mine, where 70% of students were white. Some white students were assigned to schools far outside their communities, while non-white (literally, one big indistinct group of anything but white people) could be assigned to a school in a whiter community to maintain this balance.

This policy was taken to the Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 by a group of parents and was struck down. However, the decision was split, and Justice Anthony Kennedy cited that while preventing racial isolation was an important quest, the Constitution does not allow for classifying students based on race when desegregating communities where no racial discrimination was present. This touches on an important philosophical concept—if segregation is natural, in that no tangible barriers exist to divide the races, yet it happens regardless, is it the government’s job to correct it? What if barriers existed in the past, but were removed? What if, as we are seeing today, once active desegregation plans end, the population resegregates itself?

Desegregation past the point of removing barriers (such as oppressive laws), as we see in the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1, is an overreach of government power. It is one thing to desire diverse communities because of the educational, economic, and social benefits, but it would be too extreme to attempt to restructure communities based on race alone. Firstly, the assignation of the concept of diversity to one aspect, race, is a huge oversimplification. In the Seattle Public School District, there were two categories— white, and non-white. The idea that adding a “non-white” to a student population will improve the culture and balance should strike you as offensive. Grouping Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and more into one homogenous, diversifying group is a ridiculous way to view cultural diversity. Segregation, and racism for that matter, goes far beyond a barrier between white and non-white. While the idea of diverse schools is wholly positive, the methods to create them are extreme and invasive. Would you want your child to be bussed two hours away to an elementary school on the basis of his/her ethnicity? Neighborhood schools are an incredible resource because of their unifying capabilities. Birthday parties, carpools, walking to school, neighborhood friends, parent-teacher conferences… Would any of this be possible when the school your child attends is hours away from that of your next-door neighbor?

So what should the plan be going forward? Should we compartmentalize people further, isolating their individual features to compose perfect, diverse neighborhoods? Is that really the dream of desegregation? Perhaps it is better to accept that the key to desegregation is choice, the absence of barriers. If hypothetically those barriers are gone, is there any way that resegregation is wrong? Of course, we aren’t quite at this barrier-less world, but I do know that we are no closer if we task the government with organizing people so they are working, living, and being educated in our fickle perception of balance. While it is a positive thing to live among people different than oneself, how far are we willing to go to do so? Forcibly diversifying is not truly diversifying at all—what should be endorsed is the building of strong communities in every part of a state, every part of the country. Bussing poor minorities to wealthier white schools shouldn’t replace work to improve the community schools in the neighborhoods those children call home. What is crucial is giving people choice and mobility, allowing them to decide for themselves where to live and educate their children. In the case of the lawsuit against the Seattle School District, parents decided that it was better to educate their children in a neighborhood school as opposed to taking part in a diversifying experiment that, with a crude and heavy hand, split communities apart. While the government is no more gifted at empowering struggling communities than rearranging them, it is far more worthwhile to try to make every neighborhood vibrant and healthy, appreciating the history and cultural makeup of neighborhoods, not destroying them.