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

Cashin, Sheryll

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586483390 ISBN 13: 9781586483395

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2005

Synopsis

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. But with the expensive price tag attached to "winner" communities, middle-income whites also struggle to afford homes in good neighborhoods with acceptable schools.
What's worse is that we've come to accept our segregated society. Most whites have bought into the psychology of the bulwark: the idea that separating themselves from different races and classes is the only sure route to better opportunity. African-Americans, on the other hand, have become integration weary. Many escape to affluent all-black enclaves in hopes of thriving among their own, even as they attempt to insulate themselves from their less advantaged brothers and sisters. Sheryll Cashin shows why this separation is not working for most Americans.
In a rapidly diversifying America, Cashin argues, we need a radical transformation-a jettisoning of the now ingrained assumption that separation is acceptable-in order to solve the riddle of inequality. 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.

From Publishers Weekly

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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Edition details

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1586483390
• ISBN 13: 9781586483395
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 391