Blacks and the Pursuit of Opportunity and Equity in a Suburban District: Unmasking Institutional Racism

• In Event: 30.066 - Educational Research and the (Re)Construction of Black Educational Opportunity in Public Discourse and Civic Action

Abstract

This paper draws on the experiences of black families in a small Northeastern, suburban school district to examine how institutional racism is masked, reproducing social inequality over generations. In a society in which the ideology of meritocracy reigns and rags to riches stories proliferate in mass media, it can be exceedingly difficult for the general public to understand why Blacks continue to post worse educational outcomes than others decades after the removal of legal barriers to educational success. The aim of this paper is to lay bare the complicated and multilayered ways in which educational inequality persists in the post-Brown era and often goes unseen and unchecked, despite the advocacy, organizing and resistance to discrimination of Black communities. To change current conceptualizations of educational opportunity that blame disadvantaged communities for their educational failures and leave inequality intact, researchers must continue to document the processes by which the opportunities of blacks and other disadvantaged groups are circumscribed in an era of free choice and freedom.
Based on data from a yearlong ethnography of Sampson Hills, including documentary evidence, archival data, and interviews with 100 residents, many whose families have resided in the district for over three generations, this paper tells an all-too common story of black overrepresentation in special education and underrepresentation in advanced classes. However, because many of the black families have a long history in the district, we have a rare opportunity to trace the trajectory of the group’s experience in the district and broader community over time. This allows us to capture the ways in which the district responded to the changing legal and social status of blacks as well as how blacks responded to the new opportunities and challenges of the times. Desegregation, for example, brought new opportunities for black Americans nationwide, but while blacks celebrated the change, whites— even in the North—resisted it. In Sampson Hills, as elsewhere, one strategy whites used to maintain segregation was to target black students for special education. Believing that school officials knew best, black parents often complied with the district’s recommendations. As this paper describes, the district’s strategy, carried out over many decades, has had a profound, and in some cases tragic, impact on Sampson’s black community.
To understand the parents’ compliance and illustrate how institutional racism is masked, I draw on theories of trust and power, and the concept of plausible deniability (Lui and Mills 2006). Yet rather than focus on the privileged—who studies of inequality too often characterize as the only people with agency—and how they maintain their advantage, I focus on those who are disadvantaged within the system and their meaning making and actions. Indeed, other studies have effectively characterized the ways in which whites use their resources to secure advantages as opportunity hoarding (Kelly and Price 2011; Lucas 2001;), but there has been much less attention to the question of why others let them. As Paul Willis and others have shown, this is a particularly powerful way of illustrating how inequality is reproduced.

Author

• Karolyn D. Tyson, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill