Outlawing explicit race measures resegregates schools through residential sorting

Evidence

Private preference expression is leading to the resegregation of public schools in the US today. They are significantly more segregated than they have been since the 1960s. A Civil Rights Project study under the direction of Gary Orfield shows that as white families are aging, the numbers of black and Latino children are spiraling. Tied to municipal residential segregation, black and brown children are increasingly isolated in impoverished public schools. This dramatic trend is exacerbated by a Supreme Court ruling in mid-2007 regarding legitimate means for achieving racial diversity in public schools. While reaffirming the importance of diversity to education, the ruling nevertheless prohibited the use of race to achieve integrated or diverse school bodies, for instance, by assigning children to schools by race. Children as a consequence resort to attending public schools in their residential neighborhoods, residential segregation thus reproducing educational isolation. The impermissibility of race as a technology of public governance is replaced by private racial preferences, with debilitating outcomes. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s contact/institution gap test — the very constitutional ruling meant to end discrimination instead channels it into private preference, a causal inversion that may replicate across non-race identity axes (citizenship sorting in schools). — connects to: Racism persists even where formal segregation laws have been abolished; Federal housing programs institutionalized residential segregation through redlining and demolition — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 1196; Parental school choice fragments entire educational systems along racial lines — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3158 (+9 more)
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the trees piece only thematically? No — better: this ‘privatization re-creates the discrimination it claims to abolish’ inversion parallels themes in the sacrifice piece about how formalized egalitarian codes conceal renewed hierarchy.

Broader Connections

• Eliminating racial data collection protects rather than ends racial discrimination #corroborates (0.82)
• Refusing to count by race masks ongoing structural racial restriction #corroborates (0.80)
• Racially patterned residential preferences reproduce segregation without overt racism #expands (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1783
• Federal housing programs institutionalized residential segregation through redlining and demolition #expands (0.75) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1196
• Racism persists even where formal segregation laws have been abolished #qualifies (0.72)
• Parental school choice fragments entire educational systems along racial lines #expands (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3158
• American racism shifted from constitutionalized segregation to privatized preference-driven apartness #expands (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 365
• Residential segregation deepened even as expressed racial prejudice declined #expands (0.72)
• Racial ordering persists by relocating from public law to private spheres #expands (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1845