"People Don't Talk About Race": Being Black in a Color-Blind Place

• In Event: Imagined and Realized Places: Spatializing Youth Political and Racial Identity Development

Abstract

In a hopeful 2016 New York Times article: “As Other Districts Grapple with Segregation, This One Makes Integration Work” Morris School District (MSD) in New Jersey was singled out as a place in which the impossible had happened: a 1970s merger between the primarily Black township and the majority white town had resulted in one of the most integrated school districts in the state. Claiming diversity in a state that is the sixth most segregated for Black students, and seventh most segregated for Latinx students in the U.S. (Flaxman et al., 2013) is no small feat. A 2015 demographic profile found that MSD is 52 percent white, 11 percent Black, 32 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent Asian, which roughly matches New Jersey’s overall student population (Tractenberg, Roda, and Coughlan, 2016). Tractenberg et al. (2016) found that most families consistently make the conscious choice to stay in-district because of the perceived benefits of “diversity.”
MSD, while diverse, suffers from a number of ongoing challenges: within school segregation is prevalent because of tracking or ability grouping that sorts students into classes or specialized programs by perceived ability, which is often tied to race and class (Roda, 2015; Brooks et al., 2013; Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Mickelson, 2001; Oakes, 2005). Students of color are also disproportionately referred for disciplinary reasons and are given stricter punishments compared to their white peers—taking away from teaching and learning time (Skiba, et al., 2011). Most insidiously, discourses of colorblindness impact the educational experiences and formation of student political and racial identities in school. Colorblindness was reflected in our school interviews, as one teacher proudly told us during a focus group, “I don’t see race, I just see children.”
Taken from a larger, multi-year study, this paper explores how Black students at Morristown High School understand themselves racially and how they articulate their experiences with racism in their descriptions of place. We draw from student focus group interviews, teacher and administrator interviews, and interviews conducted with the Melanin Minds African-American Culture Club to answer two interrelated questions: how do the descriptions of Morristown’s uniqueness as a diverse place relate to the way in which Black youth come to see themselves as members of their schooling community? How do colorblindness and an emphasis on civility impact Black youth understandings of everyday acts of racism and race-making?
Situated in the literature on school segregation and educational inequality we employ Berrey’s (2015) research to conceptualize MSD as an “enigma of diversity.” We use this framing to think through who benefits from the structures and policies in place, and who is disenfranchised and left out from reaching their fullest potential. We argue that this diversity discourse enables the "selective inclusion" of some Black students in White classroom spaces, but avoids a comprehensive program of justice that would break down the structures that keep the school community internally divided.

Authors

• Allison Roda, Molloy College

• Deirdre Mayer Dougherty, Knox College