The Failures Of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream - Hardcover

Cashin, Sheryll

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158648124X ISBN 13: 9781586481247

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2004

Synopsis

Published for the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education: If "separate, but equal" has been illegal for fifty years, why is America more segregated than ever?

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously declared that separate educational facilities for blacks and whites are inherently "unequal" and, as such, violate the 14th Amendment. The landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, sounded the death knell for legal segregation, but fifty years later, de facto segregation in America thrives. And Sheryll Cashin believes that it is getting worse.

The Failures of Integration is a provocative look at how segregation by race and class is ruining American democracy. Only a small minority of the affluent are truly living the American Dream, complete with attractive, job-rich suburbs, reasonably low taxes, good public schools, and little violent crime. For the remaining majority of Americans, segregation comes with stratospheric costs. In a society that sets up "winner" and "loser" communities and schools defined by race and class, racial minorities in particular are locked out of the "winner" column. African-Americans bear the heaviest burden. Cashin argues that we need a transformation-a jettisoning of the now ingrained assumption that separation is acceptable-in order to solve the riddle of inequality in America. Our public policy choices must be premised on an integrationist vision if we are to achieve our highest aspiration and pursue the dream that America says it embraces: full and equal opportunity for all.

About this title

About the Author

Sheryll Cashin was born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where her parents were political activists. She was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and served in the Clinton White House as an advisor on urban and economic policy. A Professor of Law at Georgetown University, she is a frequent television commentator on law, politics, and race relations.

Reviews

In another of a spate of Brown v. Board of Education 50th anniversary books this season, this compelling book, beyond a lament about Brown's unfulfilled promise, argues that integrated, multi-class communities are the only fair solution. Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown, reminds us that our enduring segregation is the product of private and public choices, such as exclusionary zoning, federal mortgage insurance and urban redevelopment (which created hyper-segregation in public housing). Cashin sees inevitable costs to middle-class black separatism: African-Americans in suburbia are usually steered to enclaves in the opposite direction of economic growth; when they hit critical mass, whites flee, poorer blacks move in, schools decline and commercial and retail investors steer clear. For whites, the search for suburban privilege also has its costs: higher prices for housing, suburban sprawl and the more intangible incapacity to relate to the "other." High-poverty schools lack both models for success and activist parents, and also breed an oppositional culture—all a prelude to the extraordinary rate of black men in the criminal justice system. Cashin argues that civil rights groups should focus more on attacking housing discrimination and segregation. She also advocates other policies: break up the ghettos (such as via programs that give suburban housing vouchers to those in public housing), offer incentives for ownership in high-poverty neighborhoods, require new developments to have low-income housing and expand school choice and cross-jurisdictional choice. Cashin argues powerfully that such integration is crucial to build democracy and diminish racial barriers: "[T]he rest of society should stop fearing us and ordering themselves in a way that is designed to avoid us where we exist in numbers."
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The landmark Brown v. Board of Education has not led to integrated education for black children, because our nation's housing patterns are stubbornly segregated along class and race lines. Because this state of affairs is not written into law, it appears to be "normal." But Cashin, a law professor, challenges this assumption, asserting that racially segregated housing, and the resultant segregated schools, is an outgrowth of government and social policies that can and should be reversed. Severely demarcated communities of winners and losers exact a high price for society overall, with the rising cost of ameliorating the results of hypersegregation. Cashin acknowledges the difficulty of getting higher income Americans to recognize the enlightened self-interest in more integrated housing, but she offers several strategies for breaking down barriers in housing patterns. This work supports the objectives of an American ideal that has been long lost in our current world. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158648124X
• ISBN 13: 9781586481247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416