[lg policy] The Lost Language of Integration

Thu Sep 29 15:23:14 UTC 2016

 The Lost Language of Integration

Has society let go of the belief that disparate communities can be brought
together for a common goal without one absorbing the other or both tearing
each other apart?

By John Feffer <http://fpif.org/authors/john-feffer/>, September 28, 2016.
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[image: segregation-apartheid-wall]

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In a recent *This American Life* episode
<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/transcript>,
investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones discusses the perils of
America’s segregated school system. She points out that there has been only
one proven way to narrow the performance gap between African-American and
white schoolchildren, and it has nothing to do with magnet schools, or
Teach for America, or any of the newfangled efforts to right a wrong
system. The only strategy that has shown demonstrable success in the last
half century has been: desegregation.

Between 1971 and 1988, the gap between the standardized reading scores of
black and white 13-year-olds dropped by more than half. “And these scores
are not just the scores of the specific kids who got bussed into white
schools,” notes host Ira Glass
<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/transcript>.
“That is the overall score for the entire country. That’s all black
children in America, halved in just 17 years.”

The reason is quite simple. “What integration does is it gets black kids in
the same facilities as white kids,” Hannah-Jones remarks. “And therefore,
it gets them access to the same things that those kids get — quality
teachers and quality instruction.”

Court-ordered desegregation has not completely ended. Just this summer, a
U.S. District Court ruled that a school district in Mississippi
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/us/cleveland-mississippi-school-district-desegregate.html>
integrate its schools — 50 years after the filing of the first legal
action. For the most part, however, this kind of legal intervention is a
thing of the past, particularly after the Supreme Court decided
<http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-07-26/racial-tensions-flare-as-schools-resegregate>
in 1991 that desegregation was never intended to be permanent, thus letting
school districts off the hook.

As a result, inequality has sharpened. In a 2005 *Nation* article
<https://www.thenation.com/article/overcoming-apartheid/>, Harvard’s Gary
Orfield told Jonathan Kozol that “the desegregation of black students,
which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded
to levels not seen in three decades.” According to a more recent report
from the *Government Accountability Office
<http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/676745.pdf>*, the number of students
attending highly impoverished schools with mostly black or Hispanic
students doubled between 2000 and 2014. Moreover, across the nation “the
typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every
three classmates (64%) are low-income, nearly double the level in schools
of the typical white or Asian student (37% and 39%, respectively),” the
Civil Rights Project reported in 2012
<https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/mlk-national/e-pluribus...separation-deepening-double-segregation-for-more-students/orfield_ePluribus_executive_2012.pdf>
.

The failure here is not one of ideas or policies. We’ve known for half a
century what works to end educational apartheid in the United States. The
failure is political. Our elected representatives are not willing to take
the necessary political risks to implement a program that works but
encounters resistance among some (white) people.

When I travelled throughout Eastern Europe a couple years ago, I
encountered nearly the same educational apartheid. Nearly half of all Roma
children
<http://www.equineteurope.org/European-Commission-targets-school-segregation-of-Roma-children-in-Hungary-with>
attend segregated schools in Hungary. In Slovakia, school districts are
gerrymandered
<http://www.romaeducationfund.hu/sites/default/files/documents/segregation_of_roma_children_in_education_-_successes_and_challenges_-_final.pdf>
to keep Roma children separate, and where that’s been impossible,
administrators separate out Roma by floor within schools. In Romania and
Bulgaria, many Roma children don’t receive any education at all. I spoke
with Roma activists who have tried to challenge these inequalities legally
and politically. Some organizations relocate a handful of Roma children
<http://www.johnfeffer.com/the-ghettos-of-eastern-europe/> to better
schools. Virtually everyone recognizes that government-directed
desegregation
<http://www.romaeducationfund.hu/news/ref/news-and-events/new-policy-brief-recommends-how-eliminate-segregation-roma-schools>
is the only viable, long-term solution. Anti-Roma prejudice, however, is
even more endemic in the region than racism in the United States (no one I
talked to could even imagine a Roma president, for instance). Very few
non-Roma politicians in Eastern Europe are willing to stand up for Roma and
for what is right.

Not all integration works the same way as desegregation in pushing everyone
to meet higher standards. The North American Free Trade Agreement, for
example, integrates the economies of three countries, but in a way that
fails to lift the labor or environmental standards, not to mention the GDP,
of Mexico to the level of Canada. As Donald Trump is also proving every
day, one can unite people by appealing to their worst instincts rather than
their best.

If the failure of integration were limited to the educational sphere,
perhaps enough political will could be mustered to overcome fear,
prejudice, and just plain inertia to reduce institutional racism. But what
if not enough people believe any longer in bridging large gaps in wealth,
performance, and achievement through collective action? Perhaps the entire
enterprise of integration, a cornerstone of the progressive agenda, has
simply collapsed.

*The Seductions of Inequality*

It’s intriguing that school integration reached its high point in the late
1980s and declined after a 1991 Supreme Court decision. The timing
coincides with three other notable failures of integration: the collapse of
the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in rapid succession. It
was easy enough to blame communism for the failure of these multiethnic
states to cohere after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the inability to
maintain integrated states was only tangentially related to Marxism. Both
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia existed as multinational states prior to
communism, and much of what became the Soviet Union had been unified under
the tsars.

The two primary causes of disintegration were nationalism (the assertion of
a separate identity from the more encompassing multiethnic one) and
resentment (that the resources of the state were unevenly divided among the
subnational entities). Slovaks felt that they were getting a raw deal from
the new democratic government in Prague; Slovenes and Croats felt that
Serbs were disproportionately represented in the federal authorities and
were unhappy with the flow of funds to underdeveloped regions to the south;
Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians bristled at the way the Kremlin
dictated policy. Anger at “their” economic and political policies
dovetailed with the nationalist call to assert “our” control instead.

These suspicions of misdirected funds and the arrogance of the “imperial”
metropole have reappeared in a new guise in the current Euroskepticism
sweeping through Europe. In countries that once complained of Moscow, you
now hear complaints about Brussels. And the anger at “lazy” Kosovars or
Bosnians during the days of Yugoslavia has become anger at “lazy” Greeks.

The European Union was once the greatest example of “harmonizing up.” The
EU was committed to bringing its poorest members up to the level of the
richest. Nor could the poorer countries take a shortcut by establishing
lower environmental or labor regulations to attract polluting, sweatshop
industries. Integration meant a step forward for everyone.

But this process butted up against a much more powerful force moving in the
opposite direction: globalization. At first glance, globalization would
seem to be the greatest of all integration projects. The increased flow of
trade around the world means that Mongolians are more likely to watch
Korean soap operas, Germans more likely to listen to Brazilian pop music,
Americans more likely to enjoy authentic Moroccan food. But this cultural
intermixing is superficial. For more often than not, globalization results
in the dominance of market leaders (Hollywood films, Chinese textiles).
Moreover, for the most part, globalization pushes countries to compete with
one another by gutting regulations and standards in a race to the bottom.

The EU doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In the deference it pays to the financial
sector, the pressures of free-trade agreements, and the demands of
sovereignty, the EU has begun to tolerate much greater gaps in wealth
<https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2015-09-09/increasing-inequality-plunging-millions-more-europeans-poverty>
than it would have done in the past. Strict budgetary constraints now make
it more difficult for individual governments to pour money into job
retraining programs or infrastructure development that could mitigate
income inequality. Integration has become a step forward for some,
stagnation for many more.

Another striking example of this declining commitment to integration can be
found in the campaign against “multiculturalism” in Europe. At the top,
leaders like Angela Merkel
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/12/14/angela-merkel-multiculturalism-is-a-sham/>
and David Cameron
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/cameron-my-war-on-multiculturalism-2205074.html>
have declared that “multiculturalism” has failed because large numbers of
new immigrants have not acculturated into the dominant society. In *Foreign
Affairs*, Kenan Malik has penned a couple essays
<https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/western-europe/failure-multiculturalism>
on how “multiculturalism” has departed from liberal principles of
individual civil liberties — and treating everyone as equal citizens — in
favor of collective rights that emphasize difference rather than
commonality. And right-wing populist groups have denounced the
“multicultural” policies that have turned France or Germany or the
Netherlands into pluralist societies that no longer resemble the imagined
homogenous countries of old.

In all these cases, the critics have bundled together all the things they
don’t like about the changing demographics of their societies and slapped
the label “multiculturalism” on it. Thus, multiculturalists are to be
blamed for the persistence of honor killings, female circumcision,
terrorism by Islamic extremists, rioting in “no-go” zones, and the like.
However, this explanation fails to take into account that such deplorable
behaviors take place in countries like France, which require assimilation
into a dominant civic culture, and the UK, which has generally favored a
more laissez-faire, patchwork approach.

Ultimately, the issue has nothing to do with a clash of cultures, any more
than the difference in test scores between whites and blacks in the United
States can be attributed to cultural (read: racial) differences. When
people have access to the same resources, they perform at the same level.
In Europe, when people have access to the same education, housing, and
jobs, they similarly perform at the same level (i.e., as responsible
citizens). Sure, there are outliers, just as there are plenty of
middle-class, non-immigrant French or Germans who commit crimes or behave
abominably. But when Denmark makes a big show of cutting social benefits to
immigrants by 45 percent
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/denmark-refugees-immigration-law/431520/>,
it reveals the erosion of the belief that integration at the level of
resources can eliminate disparity in results.

The backlash against the current wave of refugees coming from Syria can’t
be understood outside of this context of disappointment with efforts to
integrate immigrants who arrived in the past. The same holds true in the
United States, where fears of Syrian terrorists hiding among the refugees
intersects with rhetoric about Mexico “not sending their best” and the
necessity
of Americans to speak English
<http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-speak-english-spanish-820215>
all the time.

The EU’s motto is “united in diversity.” The EU is bold in insisting that
unity doesn’t depend on assimilation and forced homogenization, and that
diversity, meanwhile, does not necessarily lead to fragmentation. That is
the ideal of integration. And it no longer seems to command the same
respect that it once did. Inequality has become an accepted state of
affairs among an increasing number of people who either benefit from the
status quo or hope to do so some day.

*The Powerlessness of Ideas Alone*

Washington think tanks expend enormous energy — and resources — in coming
up with ideas that will solve the problems of the day. But as the case of
desegregation of schools demonstrates — in the United States, in Eastern
Europe — the problem is not a lack of ideas. We know what works. We simply
lack the political will.

Nor does political will appear magically when the right person in the right
place suddenly, through some mysterious process, has a conversion
experience. That rarely happens. Political will usually appears as a result
of pressure from the outside that changes minds on the inside. Lyndon
Johnson was by no means the likeliest candidate to usher through civil
rights legislation. He was a thoroughgoing racist
<http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/lyndon-johnson-civil-rights-racism> who opposed
civil rights for two decades. But he was also an astute politician who bent
to the winds of change. The civil rights movement’s achievements were the
offspring of collective pressure and political opportunism.

We face other realms of policy where we know what works but can’t muster
the political will to make the necessary change. Cutting carbon emissions
and switching to renewables is the obvious way to avoid burning the planet
to a crisp. Ending the embargo on Cuba will help pull the island out of its
economic doldrums and accelerate political reforms. As with desegregation,
however, significant obstacles loom in both cases, whether it’s major
corporations that profit from fossil fuels or a right-wing Congress
committed to fossilized ideologies. Overcoming those obstacles requires
political will that in turn requires social movements.

But those social movements also need a unifying belief. Building a fair and
equal multiethnic society requires a belief that disparate communities can
be brought together for a common goal without one community absorbing the
other or both communities tearing each other apart. From desegregation to
the European Union to societies that welcome and cherish immigrants, a
belief in the power of integration is essential. Yet in today’s fragmenting
world, many people are losing faith.

John Feffer directs Foreign Policy in Focus.
http://fpif.org/lost-language-integration/

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