“Not Separate but Still Unequal”
Terry Allen
Much of education law scholarship on school segregation has focused on majority-minority schools. Yet school segregation does not occur only in majority-minority schools, but also in so-called integrated schools: majority-white and Latine schools in which Black children are in the minority. What we know about segregation in these schools focuses on tracking, the practice of segregating Black students in classrooms according to ability, which has deleterious effects on Black children in schools where they are the minority. Outside of tracking, we have few firsthand accounts of integrated schools’ effects on these students.
In this Article, I present data obtained from in-depth interviews with ninety-five Black students and fifty Black parents. These students and parents moved from majority-Black schools to schools in which they were in the minority seeking the perceived academic benefits of an integrated school. Yet, integration and achieving better educational outcomes concern more than simple racial demographics of schools. In these interviews, students identify another avenue of in-school segregation: school policing. Black students in these integrated schools experience pervasive surveillance and punishment by school police in collaboration with other school officials. Rather than feeling truly integrated, these students feel both marginalized and unsafe in ways that undermine the academic benefits that integration is supposed to produce.
This Article does not merely contend that Black students are policed irrespective of the racial demographics of their schools. It also argues that scholars, policymakers, and lawyers need to be more attentive to student experiences in order to explicate how formally integrated institutions can nonetheless serve as domains of racial segregation. Policing affects schools’ institutional culture, reducing the benefits that were supposed to accompany racial integration. This reality suggests that the project of racial integration for Black students, a project that Brown v. Board of Education launched more than seventy years ago, may be even more illusory than we generally understand.
