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10/19/2005:

"Separate and Unequal"

“SEPARATE BUT equal”--the doctrine from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling that solidified the system of racist segregation--was always a lie. The reality of schools under Jim Crow was always separate and unequal.

Now, 50 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down “separate but equal” as inherently unfair, schoolchildren in the U.S. are again suffering the consequences of segregation--an all the more odious reality because segregation has been outlawed on paper.

In his new book Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol rips the veil off of America’s “apartheid schools.”

Schools have been re-segregating for the past dozen years, Kozol explains, so that “the proportion of Black students in majority-white schools has decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968.” Gary Orfield and the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University show that 2 million students attend these “apartheid schools” (a term Kozol uses for schools where the student body is more than 99 percent non-white). Overall, almost three-quarters of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority.

Kozol says that “the four most segregated states, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In California and New York, only one Black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.
zmag.org