It seems unjust that people should be preferred for any government benefit on the basis of race. As affirmative action of this sort is currently being considered by the Supreme Court, this is the first of a series of blog posts considering how it could possibly be justified. Although “affirmative action” was first used in connection with government contracts, here we consider it in educational contexts, the focus of current controversies.
When Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) was decided, making it illegal for states to require racial segregation in their schools, states didn’t immediately integrate their schools. They just repealed the laws that had required segregation, and school boards assigned students to schools on the same racial criteria as before. The only difference was that they were no longer compelled to do so by state law. Schools remained as segregated as before, and black children continued to receive inferior education.
When federal courts declared this practice to be unconstitutional, some states allowed parents to choose which school within the district to send their children, space permitting. These were called “freedom of choice” plans. But black children were in most cases threatened with violence if they attended previously all-white schools. In the South at that time, all-white juries tended to acquit white people of all manner of crimes against black people, including murder.
After federal courts declared “freedom of choice” plans unconstitutional because they resulted in continued segregation, opponents of integration found that racially segregated housing patterns in both the North and the South allowed segregation to be largely maintained simply by assigning students to the nearest school. They thought this would pass as neutral and innocuous.
But segregated housing patterns weren’t the result of people just wanting to live near others like themselves, as in “birds of a feather flock together.” During World War II, many blacks moved to the North to escape Jim Crow laws in the South and to avail themselves of the improved occupational opportunities in the North that resulted from increased production for the war. When the war ended, the Federal Government guaranteed loans to former service personnel so they could buy their own houses, as individual home ownership is part of the “American dream.” But they excluded blacks from the program.
Loans from banks weren’t usually available to blacks except for houses within certain red-lined areas designated for black residents. And if a black person nevertheless had the finances to buy a home in an all-white neighborhood, local covenants often prevented anyone from selling a house to them. White home owners had been required to sign covenants which disallowed selling their home to anyone but another white person. Such covenants were eventually deemed unlawful, but long after segregated housing patterns were firmly established.
If a black family managed to move into a white neighborhood, in the North as in the South, they were often subjected to harassment by neighbors. So, racially segregated housing patterns didn’t depend on birds of a feather flocking together as much as on policies of exclusion. Simply having students go to the nearest school didn’t solve the problem of segregated education.
What’s more, when housing patterns changed, making a historically white the school the closest to many black students, municipalities often shut the school down and build new schools so that the nearest school to students both white and black would be predominantly single race. This source of continued racial segregation was eventually declared illegal and affirmative actions to undue the resulting school segregation was ordered.
Given the history of multiple evasions, mostly through state and local laws, affirmative action was necessary to actually get white and black students into the same classrooms. Because the federal courts couldn’t undo housing concentrations, the affirmative steps to end school segregation included bussing students from predominantly white neighborhoods to areas where blacks predominantly lived, and black children to schools in predominantly white areas.
School bussing, the original affirmative action in education, was declared by opponents of desegregation to be a horrible imposition on the students, but before it was done for desegregation, and throughout the period of desegregation, bussing students was done mostly to take rural students to newly established, larger, centralized schools to improve school quality while saving taxpayer money. Today, bussing is often provided to allow greater parental choice among public schools that have diversified their offerings, one concentrating more on the arts, another on the sciences, and still others on various vocations. High-minded objections to subjecting students to the horrors of bussing concerned only bussing for integration.
In sum, affirmative action in education was intended to interfere with the perpetuation of racist policies that disadvantaged black people. Generally speaking, social arrangements, including those that are unjust, tend to be self-perpetuating. Changing course requires deliberate effort – affirmative action.
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