Still in Pursuit: An Ethnography of Race, Schooling, and Equality, 60 Years After Brown v. Board of Education

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), American schooling clearly remains a central arena in the fight for greater equality. How to achieve equality is less clear. Desegregation was once the ideal for creating a more just educational system, but the rise of the charter school movement has changed all that. It has given individuals and organizations the power to design schools and target populations, leading to an increase in identity-based schools. It has, ironically, also resegregated schools, causing some to decry charter schools as a setback to the progress made since Brown. However, because desegregation has largely failed, it is a bygone solution to the perduring problem of inequality. Pursuing a politics of recognition, in the form of identity-based schools, has become a more viable approach to achieving the promise of Brown today. Yet despite this shift, surprisingly little is know about these schools. While Brown was framed as a black-white issue, post-1965 immigration significantly increased diversity in the U.S., giving new application to the landmark decision. How do other groups who claim the legacy of Brown pursue equality? Moreover, although many of these schools use culturally relevant pedagogy to achieve social justice, in non-homogenous settings, can seeking recognition for some lead to the misrecognition of others? My yearlong ethnographic study examines how a school, that advances social equality, reconciles its paradoxical mission of seeking recognition for Asian American students, while simultaneously attempting to be inclusive of all racial minorities, particularly its significant black student population. My preliminary findings indicate that the role of affect, and the trope of family are important tools that the school uses to walk this delicate tightrope. The civil rights struggle for equality continues to have resonance today, even as the nation recently commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, and approaches the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. This project then aims to provide a timely and important window on how racial equality in education is being forged in contemporary America.

Author

• Roseann Liu, University of Pennsylvania