The legacy of Brown

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked its 60th anniversary in May 2014.  A unanimous opinion of the Warren Court, Brown prohibited official (i.e., de jure) segregation in the public schools and rejected the doctrine of 'separate but equal'.  "Separate educational facilities," Chief Justice Warren wrote, "are inherently unequal."  He explained that "[t]o separate them [i.e., African-American students] from others of similar age...solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."  In a follow-up opinion a year later, the Court noted that implementation of its decision would involve a "period of transition"; it ordered states to "make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" with its ruling and directed the lower courts to "enter such orders and decrees...as are necessary...to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases."  

While the practical impact of Brown, which took time to be felt fully (see below), was in some respects significant, the "symbolic quality of the decision," as Yale Kamisar observed in 1969, "was immeasurable," or at any rate substantial.  Thurgood Marshall (later, of course, a Supreme Court justice) was the main lawyer for the successful plaintiffs, and the cases consolidated in the Brown decision were the culmination of a long litigation campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.   

Writing in The Atlantic around the time of the 60th anniversary, Ronald Brownstein described Brown's "core mission" as "unfinished" and went on to observe: "...racial and economic isolation remains daunting: One recent study found that three-fourths of African-Americans and two-thirds of Hispanics attend schools where a majority of the students qualify as low-income."  Brownstein also noted that the "increasing diversity and shrinking white share of America's youth population" makes more urgent than ever Brown's "broader goal of ensuring all young people the opportunity to develop their talents."

How much and in what ways did the Brown decision matter and, more broadly, how much did the courts in general contribute to the civil rights movement in the U.S.? On the one hand, the prohibition of de jure segregation in the schools was important both symbolically, as already mentioned, and because it did lead, first in the border states and then eventually in the deep South (after years of 'massive resistance' and other forms of obstruction), to some school integration.  In 1954, 'dual' (i.e. segregated) school systems were mandated by statute in eleven southern states and six other states, as well as the District of Columbia.  The situation in the border states began to change relatively quickly after Brown, but the decision did not have any substantial effect in the deep South until the 1970s, when, as James Patterson (author of a 2001 book about Brown) notes, the decision finally was enforced.  Some cities and localities have been success stories of integration -- Raleigh, N.C., to mention one, as discussed in Gerald Grant's 2009 book Hope and Despair in the American City [link]. 

If that's the glass-half-full side of the story, the glass-half-empty side is that there is overall still a great deal of both economic and racial segregation in U.S. public schools -- there's more segregation now in schools in the North and West than there was 30 years ago.  The Supreme Court had a chance to help reverse this trend in 1974 by allowing court-ordered cross-district (urban/suburban) busing in cases of de facto (residential) segregation, but instead a 5-4 majority of the Burger Court went the other way; the case was Milliken v. Bradley.  Voluntary urban/suburban integration programs -- which typically do not involve an actual merger of urban and suburban systems, as occurred in Raleigh, but instead move relatively small numbers of students across district lines -- are not an adequate substitute for larger-scale court-ordered programs, but Milliken basically precluded those.  Today, according to this piece that aired last month on the PBS NewsHour, there are only eight voluntary urban-suburban 'transfer' programs in the country, involving all together a mere 40,000 students, and almost half of those are in Hartford, Ct.  The same piece noted that the number of 'intensely segregated' (i.e., more than 90 percent minority) schools in Rochester, N.Y., has increased fivefold since 1989, and Rochester has one of the voluntary urban-suburban programs.

There is by now a large literature on Brown and on the broader question of the courts and social change, most of which I haven't read (I've listed a few relevant titles at the end of this post, but this list is only the tip of the iceberg).  With that said, Mark Tushnet's judgment on the impact of Brown, and of civil rights litigation more generally, seems reasonable, though no judgment here will command universal agreement.  In Red, White, and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law (1988), p.132, Tushnet wrote:

Brown galvanized black communities not so much because schools were desegregated -- except in the border states substantial [de jure] segregation continued for more than a decade after Brown -- but because it showed that one branch of the national government was on their side. Two years later the Montgomery bus boycott was the first episode in the development of the modern civil rights movement, whose sit-ins and marches prodded Congress to enact important civil rights acts in 1964, 1965, and 1968. The [Supreme] Court's response to the movement was hesitant and indirect. It never ruled that sit-ins were protected by the Constitution, but it did allow demonstrators to invoke the powers of the federal courts to limit the worst sort of harassment, and it upheld innovative efforts by the executive branch to convict white terrorists under old statutes.  Overall the courts played a distinctly subordinate role in the post-1960 struggle for civil rights.  It seems fair to wonder whether the pattern of race relations in 1970 or 1980 would have been dramatically different had blacks been forced to use only political methods.

Kamisar in 1969 emphasized more strongly Brown's "galvanizing" effect, arguing among other things that it contributed to the subsequent enactment of civil rights legislation and that it sped up or "perhaps even precipitated" the Warren Court's "revolution" in criminal procedure ("The School Desegregation Cases in Retrospect," in the Chelsea House volume listed below, p.xxiv).  Probably the only certain statement is that the legacy of Brown will continue to be debated.  
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References and further reading
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights
Gerald Grant, Hope and Despair in the American City
F. Harris and R. Lieberman, "Racial Inequality after Racism," Foreign Affairs (March/April 2015)
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., All Deliberate Speed 
James T. Patterson, "The Troubled Legacy of Brown v. Board" (pdf)
Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope
James Ryan, Five Miles Away, A World Apart
Mark Tushnet, Red, White, and Blue 
 
Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952-55, vol. 1 of the series Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court (N.Y.: Chelsea House, 1970; paperback reprint, 1983), ed. Leon Friedman, with introductions by Kenneth Clark and Yale Kamisar.

[added later] R. Straus and S. Lemieux, "The Two Browns," New Political Science v.38 (2016) 

Solitary confinement in Mississippi and elsewhere

TBA posts on an NYT piece about a county jail in Mississippi holding a mentally disturbed teenager in solitary confinement (for much of two years).  This inhuman practice has not been confined to Ms., as recent stories about Riker's Island indicate.

ETA: There are also a fair number of prisoners being held in solitary in federal prisons (though I don't have time to look up the numbers right now).

ETA (again): on a different but somewhat related issue, see here (h/t to a commenter at CT).

A bilingual country?

This afternoon I had an unexpected need to communicate with someone I didn't know over the course of an hour or more, resulting from a small story involving a car and a bicycle (details I think will not be furnished on request, sorry).  The point is that he spoke no English and I speak no Spanish, apart from a few words.  (French, which I do speak to an extent (emphasis on the last three words), is useless where I live.)  Everything ultimately worked out, partly because enough people around here speak both English and Spanish.  It just underscores that parts of the U.S. seem to have become virtually bilingual, leaving those who are not at something of a (potential, at least) disadvantage in daily life.

A CNN piece from Sept. 2013 quotes an expert at the Pew Research Center as follows:

"On the one hand, [in the U.S.] the number of Spanish speakers is projected to grow to about 40 million by 2020 (from 37 million in 2011). This reflects Hispanic population growth and a large number of non-Hispanics who will also speak Spanish," said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic Research at the Pew Research Center. "But, even though the [total] number of Spanish speakers is projected to grow, among Hispanics, the share that speak Spanish is projected to fall from about 75% now to 66% in 2020," Lopez said.

These figures don't capture variations from one geographical area to another, of course, nor is there a specific projection here for bilingualism.  It's interesting to learn that the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. who speak Spanish will drop to roughly two-thirds in 2020, even as the Hispanic population grows, but knowing this certainly does not matter when an English-speaker and a Spanish-speaker have to communicate and can't.  Luckily my experience today did not involve anything serious.  I don't like to think about what would happen if the inability to cross the language barrier implicated a matter of life and death.

Note: edited slightly after initial posting.    

Unmentioned issues

Two issues that went unmentioned at both conventions: (1) the absurdly high number of people in U.S. prisons; (2) the extent of poverty in the U.S.

Unemployment and financial hardship were mentioned a lot, but there was little or no mention of poverty beyond a vague reference now and then, except in the biographical parts of speeches, which are always tales of a rise out of poverty or straitened circumstances. See this review of C. Hedges and J. Sacco's book on poverty in the U.S. (Btw, this year is the 50th anniversary of M. Harrington's The Other America.)

More on inequality

Nicholas Lemann reviews (h/t) a number of books on inequality and related issues, written from different points on the ideological spectrum. (Haven't read the whole piece, just the opening and the last part, but thought I'd pass it on.)

Life paths

If there is such a thing as an American creed and if you had to pick one statement that comes closest to encapsulating it, the most likely candidate would be Jefferson's assertion that all persons ("men" in the original) are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...."

Although the pursuit of happiness is an old notion, its translation into the idea of personal fulfillment is arguably more recent. The material precondition for this is the existence of a group of people whose (relative) affluence allows them enough leisure to worry about being 'fulfilled'. Needless to say, this observation is far from original. It was made, to take only one example, by Andrew Hacker some forty years ago in a book called (rather presciently) The End of the American Era.

In a chapter titled "The Illusion of Individuality," Hacker cast a skeptical eye on the notion that most people have hidden capacities and potentials waiting to be unleashed, if only given the right setting and opportunity. On the contrary, he wrote, "most people are ordinary...regardless of the time or society or setting in which they live." Most people, he continued, lack "any special qualities of talent or creativity" and "prefer the paths of security." They are "not terribly clever or creative or venturesome."

That may sound harsh, but what Hacker went on to say about education is, I think, still apt, more than forty years after it was written. "Middle-class Americans," he observed,

remain persuaded that with just a little more effort and some added insight they may discover their true selves. Thus the growing commitment to education, and the conviction that with schooling can come not only worldly success but also an awareness of one's own potentialities.... Yet, on the whole, the educational process has surprisingly little effect in determining how people will finally shape their lives.... [T]he overwhelming majority of college graduates...despite their exposure to higher education and their heightened awareness of life's options...nevertheless take paths of least resistance when faced with critical decisions throughout their lives.

While this was and remains a considerable overgeneralization (like virtually all such social criticism), it does bring to mind the large numbers of graduates of elite colleges and universities who have gone into investment banking, fancy consulting firms, hedge funds, private equity firms, etc., in recent years. Lately the numbers have started to decline, but for many it is still the preferred option. Of course today the majority of young people, including no doubt the majority of college graduates, face economic uncertainty, high levels of student debt, and a job market in which getting any kind of reasonably remunerative employment is a challenge. In that respect the picture is different from what it was when Hacker wrote the above-quoted passage. But it is interesting that in the late 60s and early 70s, a period one thinks of as full of experimentation and rebellion by the young (especially the 'privileged' young), at least one observer found more evidence of conformity and rationalization. Also interesting is that Hacker's The End of the American Era was published in the same year, 1970, as Charles Reich's The Greening of America, which took a quite different view of the rising generation.

P.s. (anecdotal): Back in December the NYT ran a piece about a 30-year-old American with an MBA who had decided to make a career in the slums of Rio singing hard-edged Brazilian funk. No 'path of least resistance' there.

Iraq: the clouded crystal ball

U.S. military forces have left Iraq, but it is evident that the U.S. will be dealing with the consequences of the Iraq war for some years to come. The widely-reported recent political turmoil and the increase in violence raise questions about the country's stability, while kidnapping threats issued against U.S. civilian workers in Baghdad suggest that conditions may be less than propitious for the kind of future U.S. civilian operation that the Obama administration envisages. The Green Zone, home to the largest U.S. embassy in the world, may be as much a space of confinement, albeit -- for at least some -- apparently rather luxurious confinement, in 2012 and beyond as it was during the previous years. And unresolved issues between the U.S. and Iraq's government persist, including the fate of the Iranians in the MEK group, resident in Iraq since 1986 and protected by the U.S. military until 2009. A UN-arranged deal for their voluntary emigration is in the works, but the linked article indicates that complications remain.

Four U.S. veterans of the Iraq war were interviewed on the PBS NewsHour tonight. Asked if it was "worth it" and if they would do it again, two basically answered in the negative and other two -- the two Marines on the panel -- said yes. All four agreed that there was a "disconnect" (and imbalance of sacrifice) between veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, less than one percent of the U.S. population, and the rest of society.

The debate about the Iraq war will probably never end, just as the debate about the Vietnam war has never really ended. It is doubtless possible to pile up anecdotes on both sides of the question. For every story about tens (or was it hundreds?) of thousands of dollars that were wasted in translating classics of American literature into Arabic (the books ended up in an unused pile behind an Iraqi school), there are probably stories about development projects that worked. For every instance of U.S. soldiers mistreating or even (in at least a few cases) deliberately and premeditatedly killing Iraqi civilians, there are probably cases of kindness toward and support for civilians.

It seems clear enough to me that the Iraq war was a tragic, unnecessary venture whose original justifications were either flimsy or fabricated and whose costs -- in lives, money and disruption -- could not be outweighed by the removal of Saddam Hussein, awful as he was, and by his replacement by what may or may not turn out to be a functioning polity and society. But it is, in a sense, easy for someone who sat at home and observed things from a distance to reach this judgment. Even the very well-informed journalists who covered the conflict at first hand and wrote books about it (Packer, Filkins, Chandrasekaran, et al.) probably cannot be viewed as having produced much more than, as the cliché has it, the first draft of history. It's difficult to engage in the careful comparative weighing of misery, which, along with painstaking research, is what any more definitive judgment on the conflict will require. But one thing that seems fairly certain is that it will be a long time before the U.S. embarks on another such undertaking.

Packer on the broken U.S. social contract

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs (here); looks like one has to register to get the whole thing.

Excerpts:

...in or around 1978, American life changed.... It was, like this moment, a time of widespread pessimism -- high inflation, high unemployment, high gas prices. And the country reacted to its sense of decline by moving away from the social arrangement that had been in place since the 1930s and 1940s....

This is a story about the perverse effects of democratization.... Once Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Walter Wriston of Citicorp stopped sitting together on Commissions to Make the World a Better Place and started paying lobbyists to fight for their separate interests in Congress, the balance of power tilted heavily toward business.

Of course the move to neoliberalism occurred across much of the world, not just in the U.S., but the consequences in terms of inequality were worse here.

Update: See also Zakaria in today's WaPo on social mobility in U.S. compared to Europe. (Link to be added later)

On incarceration, race, etc.

Issues of incarceration, race, and the death penalty, including the Davis case, are being written about at length here. I frankly haven't had time to do more than glance at these posts but I figured I'd put up the link for those who may be interested.

Hollywood & the military: a bit of historical amnesia

A few days ago David Sirota published a piece in which he claimed that the movie Top Gun started a Pentagon-Hollywood alliance, a 'military-entertainment complex'. In fact that alliance goes back at least to the 1940s, albeit with ups and downs over the years. More on this later.

Worth interrupting the break for...

...this piece on U.S. income inequality in WaPo today.

A brief excerpt:

In 1975, ...the top 0.1 percent of earners garnered about 2.5 percent of the nation’s income, including capital gains, according to data collected by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez. By 2008, that share had quadrupled and stood at 10.4 percent.

The phenomenon is even more pronounced at even higher levels of income. The share of the income commanded by the top 0.01 percent rose from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent over that period. For the 15,000 families in that group, average income now stands at $27 million [per family per year, presumably].

Mass incarceration in the U.S.

Two-and-a-half million people are in prison in the U.S. This post includes a powerful interview with a civil rights lawyer who has a new book about the American prison system.