White Power and Profit in New England Desegregation, 1964-1972

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 4) From Settler Colonialism to the White Right: Neighborhoods, Schools, and Whiteness

Abstract

Until 1963, despite Brown v. Board and the court-ordered and government-incentivized desegregation that followed, most schools in New England continued to exclude nonwhite children systematically. I argue that this began to change when desegregation became profitable for powerful white New Englanders. Starting with the nation’s most elite independent schools and later extending to public schools in New England’s suburbs, I demonstrate that the desegregation movement gained momentum when it converged with white New Englanders’ economic and political interests. I use historical sociological methods and draw on more than 1,000 archival sources to challenge the dominant narrative portraying segregation as a Southern issue and desegregation as inherently racially progressive. I introduce the concept of “extractive inclusion” to describe how Black and Indigenous children were admitted into institutions that had previously excluded them—but only under conditions that enabled white institutional actors to extract capital from their inclusion.

Author

• Ashleigh Imani Cartwright, University of Pennsylvania