VCU news

By Vincent Simone

It may not surprise you that the director of the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union is African-American.

But what if he told you he has a prejudice against black people?

That is precisely what the director, Dennis Parker, shared with an audience of 330 on Tuesday during VCU Libraries’ 13th Annual Black History Month Lecture, “Still Separate, Still Unequal.”

While Parker admits that he was embarrassed to discover his racial prejudices after taking Harvard’s Implicit Association Test — an assessment that measures unconscious preferences — he says that the existence of biases shouldn’t be surprising given the prevalence of stereotypes in our lives.

The depiction of black men as dangerous and sexually predatory has a long history that includes the notorious film “The Birth of a Nation” — released 100 years ago this spring — and TV shows such as “Cops.” Indeed, studies show that television and newspapers disproportionately portray the criminality of people of color.

Even Jesse Jackson once said that he feared black men on a deserted street.

Negative stereotypes and unconscious biases create problems for us all, Parker said. Fortunately, implicit bias also provides a useful frame for discussing race by removing guilt from the equation.

“When I’m able to stand up here and say, ‘I took the test and it shows that I discriminate,’ then it perhaps makes you feel a little less self-conscious, that I’m not saying, ‘You’re a white person, you’re guilty,’” Parker said. Implicit bias is “something that we all suffer from, it’s something that has a real effect, and it’s something that can be addressed, addressed through careful training, but most importantly it can be addressed through consciousness of the continuing importance of race.”

Parker once thought that people didn’t talk about race, but he has since changed his mind.

“We do talk about race, but we talk about [it] really badly,” Parker said. “And we need to change that.”

A year of contradictions

2014 was a “particularly complex and challenging” year for those who practice civil rights law, Parker said. On one hand, the United States celebrated the anniversary of both the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On the other hand, the events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, reminded Americans that, “in many ways, we remain a divided country.”

Disparities in rates of unemployment and incarceration as well as gaps in wealth all attest, Parker said, to persistent inequalities and to the continuing significance of race.

Race remains “a vital part of how we live,” Parker said, describing a recent study in which lawyers rated the quality of the writing in a legal memo very differently depending on the identified race of the memo’s author. Here’s the catch: They all read the same memo.

In addition, Parker said that recent events, notably the Supreme Court’s invalidation of a crucial component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and challenges to a key enforcement mechanism of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, suggest America’s tenuous support for the tools required to fight discrimination. Moreover, these events question our willingness “to do what needs to be done to finally put our troubled history of segregation and discrimination to rest.”

Still separate, still unequal

Parker focused his lecture on Brown v. Board, applauding the courage of the court to face the truth of race in America and asking whether “we have served this opinion and its goals well over the last six decades.”

Not only did the Supreme Court’s decision acknowledge the important role that education plays “as a precursor to participating fully as a member of society,” it also found that the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) — the legal justification for Jim Crow laws in schools and elsewhere — was “an outright, bald-faced lie,” Parker said.

The efforts to desegregate schools following the Brown v. Board decision followed a troubled road, Parker said, and “the experience of Virginia in many ways typified what went on in the rest of the country,” with the state simultaneously advancing and blocking the goals of Brown.

After extraordinary resistance to the law, which included the abolition of all public schools in some counties, Virginia achieved progress toward integration in the late 1960s and ’70s. Since then, however, although the diversity of the state’s students has increased sharply, the concentration of minorities in intensely segregated schools, that is, where enrollment includes less than 10 percent white students, has increased steadily.

To illustrate this trend, Parker offered several statistics:

·   The number of intensely segregated schools in Virginia doubled to 6 percent between 1989 and 2010.
·   In 2010, 16 percent of black students were enrolled in intensely segregated schools, up from 12 percent in 1989.
·   The number of Latino students in intensely segregated schools doubled to 6 percent between 2000 and 2010.
·   Three-quarters of the students in intensely segregated schools were considered low-income.
·   In schools with less than 1 percent white enrollment — known as “apartheid schools” — 85 percent of the students were low-income.

Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Ph.D., assistant professor of educational leadership in the VCU School of Education, told the local story by providing a statistical snapshot of elementary school segregation in the Richmond area.

Using a series of data-enhanced maps, Siegel-Hawley presented evidence of concentrated segregation and poverty in the city of Richmond, an overlap that she says is one of the central reasons for the link between segregation and unequal opportunity and outcome. What’s more, since the early 1990s, these concentrations have been spreading to some suburban areas of Henrico and Chesterfield counties.

Using information from the Civil Rights Data Collection, Siegel-Hawley also described serious racial disparities in the region’s provision of gifted and talented courses and in its use of out-of-school suspension.

“What’s happening in Virginia is not peculiar to Virginia,” Parker said. “It mirrors what’s happening nationwide, particularly in the South. For a period in the ’70s and ’80s, Southern schools were actually the most integrated in the country, driven in large part by desegregation orders … As [these] cases are dismissed, many of the gains that were realized have been lost … and the segregation levels have begun to rise.”

Despite these losses, black students in the United States are most segregated in the Northeast, not in the South. And Parker’s home state of New York is the nation’s worst case.

The costs of resegregation

To those who look at segregation in a post-Brown world and ask what difference it makes, Parker responds that “the harm is serious and widespread.”

Part of this harm is the school-to-prison pipeline, a pattern of policies and practices that push children out of the education system and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Most notably, zero-tolerance policies and the misuse of police and school-resource officers have serious consequences, especially for students of color.

“School discipline itself is a highly racialized component of our system,” Parker said. “Forty percent of students expelled from schools are black. Seventy percent of students involved in in-school arrests are black or Latino. Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended and half as likely to graduate. And the consequences of a failure to graduate are severe.”

Most alarming, of black men without a high school diploma, more than one in three will go to jail.

To those who say that the disparities in school discipline simply reflect behavior, that blacks are punished more often because they’re the ones misbehaving, Parker responds that the relevant studies tell a different story.

“There are no real, significant differences between the behavior of white students and black students or Latino students,” Parker said. “What the studies do show is that there is a big difference in the way students are treated. … White students tend to be disciplined more for the kinds of things that are undeniable violations of policy: for having weapons, for having drugs. Black students tend to be disciplined more for behavioral things, the things that are seen as a challenge to teachers: insubordination, disrespect. The subjective things.”

This is where Parker says our implicit biases come into play. Outright discrimination is one thing, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone that unconscious prejudices influence the way a teacher perceives a student, or vice versa.

While students of color disproportionately suffer the various inadequacies of segregated schools, including fewer resources, fewer certified and experienced teachers, higher concentrations of poverty and lower graduation rates, Parker emphasized that students of color are not the only ones harmed by the increasing resegregation of American education.

Which group attends the most segregated schools in the United States?

Whites.

Yet, Parker said, “Even though these students are in schools that are likely to be the ones with the greatest resources [and] to have the highest concentration of higher-income students, they, too, are disadvantaged by … segregation. … They’re denied the opportunity to learn from exposure to students different from them, a skill that’s becoming increasingly important in a global economy. So, as a result, we all suffer.”

This is one of the great harms of our increasingly segregated schools: “You don’t have a chance to see enough people who are different from you to recognize that the stereotypes are ill-founded.”

The road ahead

“There are some bright spots, which at least suggest that we can do better as a nation,” Parker said.

In the case of Sheff v. O’Neill (1996), the city of Hartford, Connecticut, has used interdistrict magnet schools and transportation to significantly improve the educational opportunities for some of its largely low-income students of color. According to a recent New York Times editorial, “The Hartford experience shows that it is possible to fight racial isolation and improve education at the same time.”

In addition, substantial research has shown that programs to create positive school environments have been helpful in reducing the rate of students’ discipline while improving educational outcomes.

Citing a recent study he used to prepare his lecture, Parker said that we can’t fix what we don’t look at; we must acknowledge race if we hope to address persistent disparities in the educational experiences of our youth.

While race discrimination in 2015 does look different from that in 1954 — a difference that demands fresh, contemporary solutions — Parker said, “we still owe the original Brown decision the courtesy of recognizing the courage of confronting truthfully the question of race in American society, and the courtesy of working to continue to realize its dream of an equal America.”

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