Here's a linguistic pop quiz: If you integrate a school, have you desegregated it? And if a school that was all-black in 1954 has come to be all-black again today, does that mean we're experiencing re-segregation? And given those demographics, wouldn't logic hold that busing was a failure, inasmuch as the goal of all that driving was diversity?
Throughout this year –- and especially in February –- news organizations will focus on race and public education as the country looks back at the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The occasion will undoubtedly call for then-and-now comparisons of school achievement and race relations. And it will call upon journalists to make sense of it all on behalf of the public.
It's an issue that doesn't really need a 50th anniversary to render it relevant. Journalists covering education in such places as North Carolina, California, Illinois, and Florida write regularly about the social offspring of the landmark Brown decision. With the spotlight on and the ideas flowing, though, now's a good time to think critically about how the stories will be framed and what sort of language you'll use to tell them.
That's important not just because excellent journalism should be precise, though that's reason enough to pay attention to words. It's also important because in retelling history, journalists can easily distort the roots of a problem and send citizens off in odd directions as they try to solve it.
Look at the language. Segregation. Integration. Desegregation. Diversity. Re-segregation. There are no synonyms there. Behind each word is an era of our history, each distinct from the others, each capable of radically reframing the way we understand the story of public education.
So know what you're saying.
Segregation has a benign meaning that could easily apply to what you do when you're preparing the laundry for washing: divided by color or fabric or the instructions on clothing labels. If the story of Brown v. Board was about that sort of segregation, we could look at many public schools today, where one race is predominant, and use re-segregation to describe where we've come to.
But the school segregation we're talking about is historically defined as enforced racial inferiority. It was not simply all-black and all-white schools. It was legally separating students by race, giving the bulk of academic and financial resources to white children. It was premised on the racist belief that letting black children attend school with white children would lead to what a Jackson, Miss., newspaper called the "mongrelization" of the white race.
It was de jure segregation; sanctioned by the law and backed by the billy club. Nothing short of a return to Jim Crow could be called re-segregation.
Likewise, integration and desegregation are not the same and shouldn't be used interchangeably. Integration happens when a monolith is changed, like when a black family moves into an all-white neighborhood. Integration happens even without a mandate from the law.
Desegregation was the legal remedy to segregation. That was the goal of the NAACP when Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers argued the cases of Linda Brown and four others before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. And that's what Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered when he told the 21 states practicing racial segregation to end the injustice "with all deliberate speed."
Here's why it makes a difference.
When language slips from the moorings of context, history is set adrift. We forget where we've been, how we got here and where we were trying to go. Stories get distorted and conflated so that the simple goal of the Brown decision –- outlawing state-sanctioned racism in public schools -– gets folded into every spin-off movement meant to fix the damage bigotry has done to the education of black children in particular and to race relations in general. Desegregation becomes busing, which becomes integration, which becomes diversity.
So 50 years later, we find journalists describing the history-altering decision to rout "separate but equal" from the American lexicon by using the word diversity. The "Brown" ruling was not about diversity, that feel-good ideal of racial utopia. It was not about black children wanting to sit next to white children. It was about demanding that states honor the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and provide black children with equal protection under the law.
Because the 1st Amendment makes journalism the only profession with Constitutional protection, journalists owe a special responsibility to the public to get this right. A nation that forgets the roots of its public school problems might squander years, even decades, trying to solve the wrong problems.
So tell the story of "Brown" and its legacy. Look critically at the NAACP's dogged pursuit of school integration decades after the court ruling. Tell the public how local school boards have failed their children. Write about race relations and the lingering aversion so many white parents have to letting their children attend schools with a black majority. Delve into the push by many black parents away from integration. Report boldly on what some sociologists say is a thread of black culture resistant to academic achievement because it looks too "white." Investigate the economic inequities born in segregation and haunting public schools to this day.
And remember that there's a difference between diversity and justice; between re-segregation and the countless forces that frustrate integrationists; between the right to choose a school in 1954 and school choice in 2004.
Words matter. That's a timeless lesson courtesy of the public schools.
Keith, I appreciate your article. The National Education Association (NEA)...
