How the Concept of Racial Entropy Came to Shape Ideas About School Segregation: A Critical Analysis of the Cybernetic Assumptions in School Demographic Models

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: School Choice or Segregated Space? Stratification, Exclusion, and Race (Table 13)

Abstract

This paper shows how “de facto” school segregation was served up and validated in the 1970s through particular mathematical models that emerged from within information theory and cybernetic game theory during the second half of the 20th century. Our objective is to expose how cybernetic ideas have come to problematically shape our current discourse and debates about school segregation. These cybernetic ideas were part of a paradigm shift in sociological theories of race relations, whereby information theory generated a new image of urban space, race, and population. We show how the concept of racial entropy was used to naturalize school segregation as a “self-organizing” emergent tendency that arises across communities.

Authors

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University

• Matthew X. Curinga, Adelphi University