Brown@65 | Nikole Hannah-Jones Keynote Recap “What is your skin in the game?” by Peter Piazza

On May 10, 2019, the Center for Education & Civil Rights and the Africana Research Center at Penn State hosted Brown@65, a national conference for the 65^th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. An earlier AJE Forum post summarized the panel presentations from the day. This post, meanwhile, focuses on the keynote, delivered by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. An exclamation point on a full-day discussion of educational injustice, Hannah-Jones’ riveting keynote covered the history of racial caste in American public education and the moral imperative to integrate schools that remain stubbornly separate and unequal. 

Her talk had a clear arc to it, with individual arguments building on each other and slides that summarized key points in a straightforward and shareable way. The headline was this question: What are you willing to do to break America’s educational caste system? What is your “skin in the game”? Here’s how she got there:

Anti-Black racism is deeply a part of the country’s psyche

She started in 1619 – 150 years before American independence – when the first enslaved people were brought to this continent. While early settlers were fighting for freedom from colonial rulers, they also needed to somehow justify their denial of freedom to others. So, a perverse psychology developed: Black slaves were believed to be inferior and therefore undeserving of the same rights and freedoms that the colonizers sought for themselves. Since then, Black people in this country have been fighting for full rights. In one of many eye-opening reflections, Hannah-Jones noted that she’s “part of the first generation of black Americans to be born with full citizenship rights”. Meaning she is among the first in her family who does not face strict legal or constitutional barriers to important social freedoms, such as where she can go to school, where she can live or who she can marry.

Education has always been supremely important to Black people

In this part of the talk, Hannah-Jones countered the narrative that Black people don’t care about education. Of course, there’s more than ample evidence for this in the civil rights era, especially the many families who fought segregation in the courts or sent their children through a rabid white mob on their way to school. Her talk presented this as evidence for the counter-narrative, but she went back further.

During slavery and immediately after emancipation, Hannah-Jones noted, education was paramount to Black people; education “didn’t mean money or a career, it meant you would be free.” And, she cited a former slave who wrote that “being robbed of an education was the most brutal sin of slavery.” Black people were informally teaching themselves during slavery, and Emancipated Black people immediately sought the establishment of schools upon becoming free.

There have always been two purposes of education

Even before emancipation in the South, Black people in the North sued for school desegregation, but were denied. Specifically, Roberts v. Boston of 1849 was the nation’s first desegregation lawsuit. Its decision, however, laid the groundwork for the “separate, but equal” doctrine affirmed in Plessy’s 1896 decision.

This set up two central points of Hannah-Jones’s talk:

• There’s long been two purposes of education: to provide opportunity to one class of people and to deny opportunity to another class. Put simply, separate education was designed to uphold a racial caste system.
• Brown v. Board of Education was truly radical, and most people don’t appreciate how important it was.

Specifically, Hannah-Jones noted, segregation is upheld by individual choices, by adherence to “what’s best for my kid” even when it conflicts with stated personal values and/or means that someone else’s child doesn’t get the same opportunities that you secure for your own.

Brown v. Board of Education: The first major rejection of caste

So, with Brown in 1954, we had the first major rejection of a caste system that had been in place since 1619. She noted the following as lowlights of the widespread resistance to implementing Brown’s mandate and highlights of its influence on the subsequent push for civil rights:

• Brown v. Board of Education, ironically, led to more progress outside of schools than inside, especially the end of “separate, but equal” in other aspects of social life (e.g., public accommodations, transportation, etc). But, civil rights progress has always been toughest in areas where white and Black people have closest contact with each other, such as schools and housing.  
• Newspapers gave an inordinate amount of press to white resistance, dominating the cultural narrative for years and giving society a faulty sense that we’ve made progress because resisters no longer throw rocks at buses carrying Black children.
• Transformation in the South began ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation was tied to federal funds in the Civil Rights Act and it was eventually curtailed sharply by Supreme Court rulings of the early 1970s. So, that means the United States spent about ten years (1964-1974) fighting a racial apartheid system that had been in place since 1619. As many have noted, the height of statistical desegregation occurred in 1988; however, even if you mark the upper end of that time period at 1988, the timing is starkly disproportionate.
• Importantly, Hannah-Jones noted that “integration isn’t important because white kids have magic that rubs off on black kids,” rather, it’s important because it allows Black children to break caste by getting the education that is intended for white children.

Dominant school reforms are akin to “neo-Plessyism”

Since the height of desegregation in 1988, the dominant education policy movement has pursued a sort of “neo-Plessyism” or a contemporary version of “separate, but equal” (see also Scott, 2019; Wells, Fox & Cordova-Cobo, 2016). Despite changes ostensibly aimed to pursue equal education for non-white students, gaps persist everywhere.

Hannah-Jones focused on test-based assessment as a linchpin of neo-Plessyism. A few key points:

• Testing was developed by eugenicists and used to prove Black inferiority.
• Tests measure advantages, not intelligence or school quality.
• Testing makes children in low-rated schools believe they are to blame for their school’s struggles.
• Integration should never be about test scores, instead it should be about whether or not it allows Black children to break caste. Hannah-Jones noted recent research from Rucker Johnson (2019) as a clear example of how integration leads to life changes that could never be measured in test scores and are so much more important than test scores anyway.

Looking in the mirror: What is your personal response to re-segregation?

Hannah-Jones built a personal message into the presentation: the challenge to find our personal “skin in the game” for real racial integration. Specifically, she noted, segregation is upheld by individual choices, by adherence to “what’s best for my kid” even when it conflicts with stated personal values and/or means that someone else’s child doesn’t get the same opportunities that you secure for your own. As she said, “you can’t argue that segregation is wrong when you are taking part in it, when your own children are benefiting from it.”

Pointedly, she challenged the audience to look in the mirror and ask:

• If your child’s not worth a perceived sacrifice (i.e., to attend low-rated schools), then whose child is?
• Do you think other children deserve the same opportunity as your kid?
• Do you need to do something with your own child to challenge America’s long-standing racist caste system?

Throughout the talk, she used the story of D’leisha,  to punctuate the points above (Hannah-Jones, 2014). D’leisha is much of what we think when we think of so-called “all-American girls” – she’s at the top of her class, a homecoming queen, dating a football player, she’s kind and popular. Except our system is not designed for her success and would never hold her up as “all-American.” Because of our educational caste system, D’leisha and her family encounter obstacles that wealthy, white students would never encounter. Notably, D’leisha’s story is the story of resegregation- her mother attended a desegregated school in Tuscaloosa, D’leisha and her grandfather both attended segregated non-white schools.

After the talk, I left thinking mostly about the challenge that Hannah-Jones gave at the end of her talk. As a white male, this means critical reflection on my experiences in segregated and overwhelmingly white public schools. Too often, I think, people use the term “segregated schools” when they’re really talking about segregated non-white/global majority schools. But, segregated majority white schools are the other side of the two-part system that upholds caste. Indeed, on the same day as our conference, CECR and the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a report on school segregation trends (Frankenberg, Asycue & Orfield, 2019). One of the major findings was that white students are the most isolated demographic group in the country. This is always a problem, and in the Trump era, it’s especially a problem given the reported rise in racial divisiveness in schools since the Trump election (Rogers, Ishimoto, Kwako, Berryman, & Diera, 2019). There was a lot to reflect on in this talk, but this is something that stands out for me immediately- the importance of talking about how segregated white schools uphold a caste system and the responsibility of white people to make decisions that challenge that system, decisions that are connected to personal biography and family.

This is the fourth installment in our Brown@65 Series. Contributors to this series for the AJE Forum presented these pieces at the Brown@65 Conference hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights and the university’s Africana Research Center.We invite you to join our conversation by commenting below, engaging us on AJE’s social media platforms, or submitting an essay of your own.

Peter Piazza is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Penn State University Center for Education and Civil Rights. His work is oriented towards understanding how public education can best prepare citizens for thoughtful participation in a multicultural democracy. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College. Peter writes about contemporary school integration at the School Diversity Notebook.

References

Frankenberg, E., Ee, J., Ayscue, J., & Orfield, G. (2019, May 10). Harming Our Common Future: America’s Segregated Schools 65 Years After Brown. UCLA Civil Rights Project-Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23j1b9nv

Hannah-Jones, N. (2014, April 11). Segregation now. ProPublica. Retrieved from https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text

Johnson, R. (2019). Children of the Dream: Why school integration works. New York: Russell Sage.

Rogers, J., Ishimoto, M., Kwako, A., Berryman, A., Diera, C. (2019). School and Society in the Age of Trump. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. Retrieved from: https://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/school-and-society-in-age-of-trump/

Scott, J. (2018). The Problem We All Still Live With: Neo-Plessyism and school choice policies in the post-Obama era. In Choosing Charters: Better schools or more segregation, I. C. Rotberg & J. L Glazer (Eds), pp. 205-220. New York: Teachers College Press.

Wells, A. S., & Fox, L., & Cordova-Cobo, D. (2016). How racially diverse schools and classrooms can benefit all students. New York: The Century Foundation. Retrieved from https://tcf.org/content/report/how-racially-diverse-schools-and-classrooms-can-benefit-all-students/