What’s in it for me? Learn why racial divisions still exist in the US education system and how we can work to overcome them.
“Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” It’s a question many parents, educators, and students ask themselves when they step inside racially mixed high schools in the United States. At many of these schools, Black, white, Latinx, and other students of color cluster together into their own groups, and they rarely engage in cross-racial dialogue.
Unfortunately, this is part and parcel of an even bigger problem in American society. While the population is becoming increasingly diverse, old patterns of segregation persist, and many people still feel uncomfortable talking about race.
Why is it so hard for Americans to talk about race? Why do racial divisions continue to keep them apart? And what can be done about these problems, both in the educational system and in American society at large?
In these blinks, you’ll find out
how schools and neighborhoods in the US are still racially segregated;
why our views of race are shaped and distorted by cultural stereotypes; and
how race-conscious parenting is important for children’s development.
Racism and racial inequality persist in the United States.
In the early years of the author’s career in higher education, a white student asked her what she would be teaching the next semester. “A course on racism,” she answered. “Oh,” the student replied, with a surprised look on her face. “Is there still racism?”
The question was baffling to the author. How could anyone be unaware of the continued existence of racism in the US?
Years later – after the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina – the author thought this attitude would change. But to her surprise, many white people continued to think that racism was a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The key message here is: Racism and racial inequality persist in the United States.
Yes, the US has made some progress on this front, especially thanks to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. But racism and racial inequality continue to afflict just about every aspect of American society – housing, education, the criminal justice system, you name it.
The numbers bear this out. For example, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest-paying occupational categories are dominated by white and Asian Americans. At the bottom of the ladder, Latinx people are overrepresented in low-paying industries such as agriculture and housekeeping. And Black people disproportionately wind up working so-called “menial” jobs, such as those of nursing aides, bus drivers, and security guards.
The extent of racial inequality in the US becomes even more obvious when you look at the income divide between white and Black Americans. According to data collected by the Pew Research Center in 2014, the median white household income was $71,300, while the median Black household income was only $43,300.
The truth of the matter is that white Americans receive many societal privileges just for being white. This can be seen in nearly every social indicator that measures their well-being – from a higher income to a longer life expectancy.
But white Americans also enjoy many privileges that may not always be so obvious to them. For example, they can shop in department stores without being followed by suspicious sales assistants. And they can send their children to school knowing they won't be discriminated against for their skin color.
So racial inequality definitely continues to be a problem in the US – but many white people are completely unaware of it. Why is that? How could they be so oblivious to something that’s so obvious when you look at the data?
Racial segregation continues to be a problem, both in US schools and American society at large.
Think of someone you haven’t seen or spoken to in a while – say, a person who’s drifted away from your circle of friends. How is she doing? What sort of issues has she been dealing with lately?
Not sure? Well, that’s the point. It’s hard to be aware of other people’s problems when you don’t even have contact with them.
Unfortunately, on a much larger scale, the same thing is happening among different racial groups in American society. It’s little wonder, then, that many white people are unaware of the persistence of racism.
The key message here is: Racial segregation continues to be a problem, both in US schools and American society at large.
You might think of school segregation as a problem that got solved back in the 1950s. But that’s not really the case. Sure, in 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declared that legally mandated segregation in schools was unconstitutional. And yes, the country then made some progress in desegregating schools in the South. But the situation didn’t improve much in the Northeast.
In fact, since the 1950s, de facto school segregation has been steadily rising in that part of the country. De facto segregation means that people are separated by race as a matter of fact (“de facto”), rather than a matter of law. In other words, their segregation isn’t legally mandated by the government, but it continues to happen nonetheless.
The reasons for this are complicated, but the results speak for themselves. As of 2017, more than 50 percent of Black students in the Northeast attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent nonwhite. And nationwide, nearly 75 percent of Black students attended so-called majority-minority schools, where more than half of the student population belongs to minority groups.
Unfortunately, segregation continues to affect not only schools but entire neighborhoods. The persistence of the problem can be seen in the way that real estate agents treat their clients. In 2006, the National Fair Housing Alliance sent out investigators to pose as prospective homebuyers in cities across the US. The results were shocking: 87 percent of the time, the investigators were directed toward neighborhoods on the basis of their race. White people were shown homes in mostly white neighborhoods, and Black people were shown homes in mostly Black neighborhoods.
As a result of segregation, many Americans grow up in communities in which they have limited opportunities to interact with people from other racial backgrounds. That can make them unaware of each other’s problems. And, as we’ll see in the next blink, it also means their impressions of other racial groups end up getting based on stereotypes, rather than knowledge of real people.
Our views of race are shaped by cultural stereotypes.
When the author was teaching at Mount Holyoke College back in the early ’90s, one of her students conducted a research project on preschoolers’ perceptions of Native Americans. As part of her research, the student went to a local daycare center and asked children of three to four years of age to draw a picture of a Native American.
Most of the children were dumbfounded by her request. They didn’t know what a Native American was. However, when she asked them to draw a picture of an Indian, they immediately grabbed their pens and began scribbling away.
The pictures were very similar: nearly all of them depicted a person wearing feathers, clutching weapons, and looking violent or aggressive.
The key message here is: Our views of race are shaped by cultural stereotypes.
The preschoolers who participated in the research project were mostly white, and they had never interacted with a Native American before. So how did they form their image of what a Native American looked like?
When the researcher asked the children this question, they said they had seen Native Americans in cartoons – the animated movie Peter Pan, in particular. This just goes to show how much entertainment can warp our assumptions about people different than ourselves.
Unfortunately, we’re exposed to misinformation about other racial groups from an early age. Just think of those preschool kids: by the age of three, they had already internalized a stereotypical image of what a Native American looked like. And that stereotype would probably go on to become the foundation for many other prejudices in their adult lives.
Here’s another example of how stereotypes inform – or, rather, misinform – our thinking. The author once witnessed a conversation between two white students about the ancestry of Cleopatra. When Student A told Student B that Cleopatra was actually a Black woman, Student B gasped in disbelief. “That can’t be true,” she said. “Cleopatra was beautiful.”
Student B was shocked by this new piece of information because it didn’t square with her deeply ingrained assumptions about who is, and isn’t, beautiful.
According to the author, all of us have prejudices – that is simply a consequence of living in a racist society. But while having prejudices may not be our fault, that doesn’t free us of the responsibility to do something about them. All of us must be proactive about examining and revising our prejudices, and we must challenge the damaging messages that our culture begins sending us at an early age.
Black children realize the significance of their racial identity during adolescence.
We all know what beginning puberty is like. You start to get pimples on your face, hair erupts in all sorts of new places, and an increase in hormones sends your mood swinging from happy to stressed to sad and back again in just a few hours.
Adolescents entering puberty also begin to explore their identities. They start asking the all-important questions: Who am I? Who was I before? Who will I become?
But for Black youth, those questions of personal identity also become intertwined with the question of racial identity: What does it mean to be a Black person?
The key message here is: Black children realize the significance of their racial identity during adolescence.
All adolescents struggle with questions of identity, but not all of them think about themselves in racial terms. In fact, Black adolescents are more likely to explore their racial or ethnic identity than their white counterparts.
Why is that? Well, according to the author, Black youths begin to think about themselves in terms of race because other people think about them in those terms.
Our self-perception is shaped by the messages we receive from those around us. And when young Black men and women enter adolescence, the racial content of those messages intensifies.
For example, when the author’s son David was seven, he described himself as smart and tall for his age. He rarely mentioned that he was Black.
But this changed when he got older. As a Black male teenager of six foot two walking down the street, he experienced women holding their purses a little tighter or crossing the road to avoid him altogether. And one time, when he was out with his new bike, a police officer stopped him and asked where he’d gotten it from.
Through these interactions, David received a series of implicit messages about his race: that he was intimidating, and a criminal.
When Black adolescents begin receiving these racial messages, they start to develop an understanding of how their racial or ethnic identities fit into the broader society in which they live. And this can happen at a surprisingly early age.
In a study of eighth-graders at an integrated urban junior high school, more than a third of the students had thought about the effects of ethnicity on their futures, and they’d discussed the issue with family and friends.
As we’ll see in the next blink, many Black adolescents also begin to grapple with what it means to be an individual targeted by racism.
Black students congregate together to share their experiences and hardships with each other.
To this day, people of color have only to flip through a magazine or switch on the television to see a negative, stereotypical image of their minority group reflected back at them. For Black women, there’s the stereotype of the “welfare queen” and the “gold digger.” And for Black men, there’s all the news footage of young Black men being led away in handcuffs – to give just a few examples.
Faced with all of these harmful images of themselves, Black teens growing up in mixed-race communities have to affirm alternative definitions of themselves. And they do this by connecting with their Black peers.
The key message here is: Black students congregate together to share their experiences and hardships with each other.
We’ve seen how segregation has prevented Black and white students from mixing at school. But there are other reasons for this, too. One is that students from similar racial backgrounds choose to gather together because they can understand, and relate to, each other’s experiences – especially when it comes to racism.
On top of that, Black adolescents who encounter racism often find that their white peers are unprepared to respond in supportive ways.
Consider the following example. A Black teenage girl attending a desegregated high school was encouraged by a teacher to attend the upcoming school dance. She knew that most of the other Black students didn’t live in the neighborhood where the school was – and that they rarely attended extracurricular activities. So she told her teacher that she wasn’t planning to come.
In response to this, the teacher said, “Oh, come on, I know you people love to dance.”
Feeling upset by this racist comment, the girl bumped into a white friend and tried to explain what was wrong. But her white friend wasn’t helpful at all. She simply said, “Oh, Mr. Smith is a nice guy. I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that.”
The problem? The girl’s white friend had brushed off her complaint and attributed it to her being “oversensitive.” With just a few words, the friend had completely invalidated her feelings.
So, when people ask why all the Black kids in the cafeteria are sitting together, the answer is quite simple: Black kids understand each other’s racial experiences in a way that their white friends just don’t.
Parents and educators can help young Black people develop their sense of Black identity.
When the author was in high school in the early 1970s, she didn’t sit at the Black kids’ table in the cafeteria – simply because there weren’t enough Black kids to fill one.
Being one of the few Black people at her school, the author experienced feelings of isolation from an early age. But that changed when she got to college. There, something happened that helped her develop her sense of Black identity. And the lessons of her experience are applicable to other Black children, adolescents, and young adults, along with the parents and educators who work with them.
The key message here is: Parents and educators can help young Black people develop their sense of Black identity.
During her college years, the author began to explore her Black identity and had what writer and psychologist William Cross refers to as an “immersion experience.” This occurs when Black individuals begin to surround themselves with symbols of their ethnic or racial identity and actively seek out opportunities to understand their history.
During this process of “active exploration,” the author began to learn more about her own ethnic-racial group and unlearn stereotypes she’d internalized. For example, she learned that there’s more to Black history than victimization, and that Africa isn’t anything like the Tarzan movies make it out to be. Both of these things helped her to develop a positive sense of identity.
Parents can help their children with this process by providing them with positive cultural images of their racial group. For instance, the author gave her son a large brown rag doll with curly black hair when he was one year old, and she read him books depicting brown-skinned children.
Having role models outside their immediate family can also help children develop their identities. That was the case for Terri, a young Black woman who had experienced racism at her school from an early age. Terri’s junior high school teacher, Mrs. Campbell, recognized that Terri needed a same-race peer group to help her build a positive self-image. So she got Terri involved with a gospel choir, which helped her make friends with other Black students who accepted and supported her.
For many Black adolescents, connecting with their Black peers is important for the development of their Black identity. Parents and educators who want to help their children should follow Mrs. Campbell’s lead. How? By providing them with opportunities to meet their Black peers in social situations – even if that means traveling outside of the communities in which they live.
White people need to develop a sense of racial identity that helps them to become aware of their racial privileges.
When the author begins classes and workshops on issues of race, she often asks participants, “What’s your class and ethnic background?” People of color always answer without hesitation, but white participants often pause before responding.
On one occasion, a young white woman described herself as middle class, but she wasn’t sure how to describe herself ethnically. Finally, she blurted out, “I’m just normal!”
Of course, she wasn’t “just normal” – she was white. But, unfortunately, like many white people, she was also oblivious to the fact that “white” is just as much a racial designation as any other. It’s not just the default category that “normal” people fall into.
So how can white people become more aware of their whiteness?
The key message here is: White people need to develop a sense of racial identity that helps them to become aware of their racial privileges.
Many white people go through life without ever having to consider their race, simply because they have always belonged to the dominant racial group in American society. Having lived, worked, or gone to school in predominantly white settings, many of them think of themselves as part of the racial norm.
Debby Irving articulated this in her memoir, Waking up White. She recalls thinking that race was for “brown and black-skinned people” and that “white” was just a plain, normal race against which all other races were measured.
According to the author, there’s a lot of silence about race in white communities. Either people have never thought about their racial group membership – or they have, and they feel uncomfortable about it. In fact, many white people experience significant psychological discomfort about their race. This includes feeling guilty or ashamed, or becoming defensive when racism is brought up.
So, while people of color have to develop an empowered sense of identity in the face of a racist society, white people have to develop a positive sense of white identity that isn’t based on notions of superiority. To do this, white people have to become aware of their whiteness – and the privileges that come with it.
Participation in anti-racist white support groups can help white individuals translate their feelings of shame into action. In her time as an educator, the author has observed that support groups like this can both help combat the social isolation that anti-racist white people often experience and educate white people on how to become effective allies to people of color.
Many white people are afraid to talk about racism, but open dialogue is an essential part of overcoming the problem.
Fear is a powerful emotion. It can make us freeze up in panic, leaving us unable to think, move, or even speak.
When it comes to discussing race and racism, many white people remain silent out of fear. The result? A culture of silence, in which the problems of race and racism have become taboo topics in American society.
Given the way that fear tends to immobilize us, all of this silence is understandable – but that doesn’t make it OK. It’s a serious obstacle to our ability to tackle racism, and it’s something that white people need to address.
The key message here is: Many white people are afraid to talk about racism, but open dialogue is an essential part of overcoming the problem.
What causes white people to be afraid of talking about racism? Well, some of them are scared they will be isolated from their friends and family for talking about uncomfortable topics. They might also be afraid of losing their privilege or status for supporting people who’ve been marginalized by society.
But those aren’t the only reasons. In the author’s experience, white students are often afraid of their own ignorance. This makes them scared to ask questions and get involved in cross-racial dialogue. Many of them also just don’t know where to begin. “How do I engage in meaningful discussions about racial issues?” they ask. “And how can I get past my fear?”
There are no simple answers to these questions. Racism is a complex issue, and there’s no clear roadmap to navigating it. But we need to navigate it nonetheless. After all, we can’t solve a problem if we’re not even willing to talk about it!
Breaking the silence around racism takes courage. The best thing to do is simply to start having conversations – even if that feels risky.
When participating in cross-racial dialogue, we must remember to try to understand and support each other's experiences, rather than seeking to undermine them. It’s especially important for white people to allow individuals from minority groups to express anger against the system that’s failed them, without taking it as a personal attack.
But making progress on overcoming racism requires action, not just words. No, none of us can solve the problem by ourselves, but there are small steps we can take as individuals. For example, you could call someone out for using racial slurs, or you could encourage the company you work for to hire more professionals of color.
No matter how little power we have to wield in this world, all of us have a contribution to make. And each of us has the responsibility to be an effective agent of change.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks:
The physical and social separation of different racial groups in the United States is a problem that continues to affect the American education system. As a result of this separation, many students in racially mixed schools feel uncomfortable talking about race. More broadly, many white people either remain unaware of the persistence of racism or are unwilling to talk about it. To help solve these problems, parents and educators need to facilitate opportunities for young people to connect across racial and ethnic divides.
Actionable advice:
Stand up against racism.
For white people who want to become effective allies, here’s a crucial thing to remember: the role of the ally is not to “help” those targeted by racism, but to stand in solidarity with them. This means speaking up against systems of oppression and encouraging other white people to do the same. If you’re white, one small thing you can do is call people out for making racist jokes or using demeaning language about people of color.
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What to read next: Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi
You’ve just learned about how old patterns of segregation still exist in American schools, which is part of why young people are so uncomfortable talking about race and racism. If you’d like to get a broader perspective on the persisting problem of racism in the US, then take a look at the blinks to Stamped from the Beginning.
In these blinks, you’ll take a dive into the nation’s history of racism, including where racist ideas originated and how they have spread. You’ll also learn why ignoring the issue of racism only perpetuates the harm done to Black communities. So, if learning more about the realities of racism in America has piqued your interest, head over to the blinks to Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi.