Social Justice Segregationism: Is Separate More Equal After All?

“These claims put forward by critical social justice-oriented scholars and educationists all lead to the same conclusion: educational justice for black and OC students begins with schools or classrooms segregated by race and ethnicity.”

Historically, white people have been responsible for neighborhood and school segregation. The story is well-known and oft-told: Jim Crow laws, redlining, Southern “Massive Resistance,” discriminatory zoning, and white flight. All of this is true. Although some may add nuances here and there, no one who knows their history would argue otherwise.

It is a commonplace lament today that seven decades after the Supreme Court ended school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and nearly 60 years since the Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining, neighborhoods and schools remain segregated. The various reasons given for this persistence—legacies of Jim Crow, covert racism, persistence of discriminatory zoning, etc.—all boil down again to a single cause: white people. It is white people who cluster in racially homogeneous neighborhoods; it is white people who send their children to racially homogeneous schools; and it is white people who leverage their political clout to block policies that promote integration by race and class.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that this is also true. Segregation in neighborhoods and schools persists today because of the covertly racist individual decisions and collective political action of white people up to the present day. My question is: Do the social justice-minded scholars, activists, educators, and pundits who ritually condemn the segregative consequences of decisions and actions taken by white people genuinely object to racial segregation itself?

I have my doubts. Most of what I hear from those who claim to speak for black and of-color people (OCPs) has strong segregative implications.