(De)Materializing White Advantage: Parents Involved and the Racial Innocence of "Community Schools"

• In Event: 49.028 - The Meaning and Matter of Materialist (Anti)racisms in Educational Research

Abstract

Seattle parent Kathleen Brose was outraged when her daughter was assigned to Franklin, rather than her first choice, the oversubscribed Ballard High School, which had recently undergone a $35 million renovation. Although Franklin had also seen a major renovation in recent years, it remained, in Brose’s words, “a heavily Black school with lower test scores.” For Brose, the district’s use of race as a factor in school assignment, although intended to achieve racial balance, penalized her daughter for being White, and prevented her from enrolling at Ballard, their local community high school. Ultimately, Brose would form a group, Parents Involved in Community Schools, which would successfully sue the Seattle Schools over this “racial tiebreaker” policy, leading to a declaration by the US Supreme Court that the policy violated students’ constitutional rights. Chief Justice John Roberts’ would assert that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” effectively denying the material advantages Whites enjoy as a result of policies and practices intended to do exactly that—assist Whites in gaining and maintaining access to property and resources (including schooling) not available to people of color.

In this paper, I argue that Parents Involved in Community Schools—both the Seattle parents’ organization and the US Supreme Court case of the same name—offer a defense of white material advantage in school assignment, even as they invoke appeals to fairness, choice and colorblindness. In Seattle, racial segregation in schools is largely a result of a history of legal housing discrimination against people of color. The north end of the city remained largely unavailable to people of color until the passage of the Fair Housing Ordinance in 1968; most people of color were (and continue to be) concentrated in the central area and south ends, areas targeted for redlining, less investment and fewer services. In Seattle, as in cities across the nation, historical White entitlement to privileged urban spaces continues, in the present, to reproduce inequities in access to educational facilities, programs and prestige. Thus, in school assignment, “to stop discriminating on the basis of race” is to allow Whites to continue to benefit from what legal scholar Daria Roithmayr (2014) calls the “locked-in advantages” of racial discrimination. Worse, justification for these colorblind policies advances the notion that those citizens with greater mobility to move to affluent areas of the city with better-resourced schools are thereby more deserving of choices than those who have been systematically locked out of these advantages. Whites, in this imagination, come by their advantages innocently.

A materialist anti-racist cultural-political analysis of school desegregation, as put forth in this paper, refocuses our attention on the racialized distribution (and maldistribution) of economic resources in the city, and situates schooling firmly within an accounting of the cartel-like accumulation of White wealth. Through this lens, we understand that “community” schools in historically segregated White neighborhoods areas are hardly innocent institutions, and may serve to reproduce White material advantage for generations to come.

Author

• Michael J. Dumas, University of California - Berkeley