The Failure of Integrationism: Civil Rights Discourse and the Attack on Public Education

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 19. Urban Education

Abstract

This paper draws on an analysis of discursive and policy applications of integrationism, past and present, to argue that school integration initiatives have suffered from both cynical co-optation and, more fundamentally, from a more pervasive marginalization of race-based demands for educational justice within the mainstream discourse on school integration. Building on my prior research on the politics of knowledge surrounding urban school integration during the 1960s, I track linkages between school integration and contemporary trends toward the defunding and dismantling of public education both through the institutional legacy of desegregation policies and through the discursive legacy of liberal research and policy advocacy. I argue that a throughline connects early formulations of a state-supported school integration agenda and the currently accelerating rightwing educational agenda of retrenchment and privatization. This analysis draws on Jodi Melamed’s critique of official antiracist discourse as it has evolved throughout contemporary U.S. history, and it draws on central tenants within the field of Critical Race Theory to center subjugated knowledges about racial injustice within the scholarly analysis of educational inequality and policy change.

Author

• Fithawee Tzeggai, University of Kansas