Black, White, and Brown.

WITH EVERY PASSING DECADE SINCE 1954 WE CONTINUE TO ASK OURselves how much the South and the nation have changed since the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended "separate but equal" education in public schools. The hallowed words of Thomas Jefferson that "all men are created equal," proclaimed at the nation's founding 178 years before Brown, seemed finally to include black men, women, and children, at least insofar as public schooling was concerned. Yet decades after court rulings ending segregation--in schools, restaurants, hotels, housing, swimming pools, and buses--the color line has hardly faded. In fact, it is beginning to look as if the line were drawn in permanent ink: black people and white people--Americans all, but still very differently situated educationally, economically, and socially. Even with massive immigration from Asia and Latin America in the last half of the twentieth century and the recent displacing of African Americans by Latinos as the nation's largest minority, we cannot seem to break free from our vision of America as fundamentally a nation of whites and blacks, with Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans playing supporting roles. In many ways we remain, as Andrew Hacker argued more than a decade ago, "two nations," black and white, separate and unequal. (1) The future that the Brown decision augured and that Martin Luther King Jr. devoutly desired could only be described as a dream, given the deep divisions that separated black America from white America since the end of slavery. Yet no other court decision in our history has done more to bring an end to state-sanctioned white supremacy, to close the long era of Jim Crow, and to offer blacks the hope of achieving equality in all walks of life. That Brown and subsequent court rulings dismantling Jim Crow have not, fifty years later, significantly narrowed the gap between whites and blacks on many fronts continues to trouble most Americans.

Part of the problem has to do with the negative role blackness has played throughout our nation's history. No other group in America traces its roots to the institution of slavery, when blacks were bought and sold as the property of their white masters. After the emancipation of slaves, the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did little to change white southerners' attitudes toward their former property, and as soon as federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ex-Confederates wasted little time before using local and state laws to deny blacks the very rights the newly enacted amendments were supposed to guarantee. The Supreme Court not only acquiesced in this reassertion of white supremacy (the "southern way of life" for the euphemistically inclined) but administered the coup de grace in 1896 when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separating blacks and whites on public transportation (and by implication in all public places) "does not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other." (2) The nation's highest court had shamelessly asserted that segregating blacks from whites had nothing to do with the pervasive belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, the fundamental principle of southern culture since the antebellum era. With the exception of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, no other Supreme Court ruling had done so much damage to the cause of equality for blacks; Plessy stood for fifty-eight years as the law of the land and was cited in hundreds of state and federal court cases as the constitutional basis for segregation in virtually all areas of life.

The very premise of the "southern way of life" rested on the assumption that blacks and whites could peacefully co-exist, but only if the color line were scrupulously observed where it counted the most--in the bedroom. Even before 1896, former slaveholders and state legislators (often one and the same) enacted laws to forbid black-white marriage, not only to ensure that mulattoes would have no inheritance rights that a white man was bound to respect but more urgently to prevent black men from marrying white women. Integration would lead to race-mixing, many white southerners believed, which for them always meant black men seeking the sexual favors of white women. On the one hand, interracial marriage was--and still is--the single greatest transgression against white supremacist ideals. Interracial sex, on the other hand, was as southern as cornbread and collard greens, at least as far as the sexual appetite of white men for black women was concerned. We are all by now familiar with the family feud between the black and white descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave, Sally Hemings. The author of the Declaration of Independence and a Founding Father of the United States was almost certainly the not-so-proud father of black children, and his white descendants are loathe to acknowledge a common bloodline with their black cousins. In the same tradition, seventy-eight years ago J. Strom Thurmond, the archsegregationist and Dixiecrat who was elected to the Senate in the same year as the Brown decision, fathered a black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams (whom the media consistently refers to as "biracial" rather than black, a racial promotion intended perhaps to soften the blow to Thurmond's family). In 1925, when he was twenty-two years old, Thurmond seduced Carrie Butler, a sixteen-year-old house maid (although to the media in 2004 it was an "affair"--not sexual exploitation), and until his death in 2003 at the age of one hundred he repeatedly denied that he had fathered a black child. No doubt Strom Thurmond is a relic of the past, but it was always understood among white men in the South, from Jefferson to Thurmond, that the strict separation of blacks and whites was to be observed only from the waist up.

To reflect on the Brown decision is to reflect on the whole of southern history, since from the era of slavery until relatively recent times the South has forcefully resisted the enfranchisement of its black citizens. Other regions of the nation, the North in particular, were often little better (and sometimes worse) in recognizing the constitutional rights of blacks, but the genealogy of white supremacy has its deepest roots in the Deep South. White supremacy never had as firm a grip on the rest of the nation, which had to contend with massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 and from Asia and Latin America after World War II. Many of the European groups--Italian, Polish, and Jewish--passed through periods of intense discrimination before transmuting into Caucasians through the racial alchemy of a melting pot that excluded blacks, Asians, and to a lesser extent American Indians. Black American citizens, orphaned by their own government, suffered the humiliation and deep disappointment of watching wave after wave of immigrants learn to negotiate the color line by distancing themselves from blacks. Immigrants moved into the urban ghettos, took jobs once held by blacks, and moved out of the ghettos. Always left behind, blacks had few allies in either government or the private sector to defend African American interests. Since slavery, blacks were accustomed to looking after themselves, but it rankled nonetheless when immigrants fresh off the boat had opportunities that blacks did not.

After 1965 the U.S. witnessed a massive influx of immigrants, primarily from Asian and Latin American countries and particularly from Mexico, and political attention shifted briefly from the problem of urban black joblessness and poverty to that of undocumented immigrants. In an outburst of anti-immigrant hysteria in California in 1994, voters passed a referendum, Proposition 187, that sought to deny medical and educational services to undocumented immigrants, mainly from Mexico, and their children. Almost half of all blacks in California, fearing economic competition from Mexican immigrants, voted for the proposition. Twelve years earlier, in a highly publicized murder, two white autoworkers in Detroit attacked and killed Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, in part because of their identification with other white autoworkers who had lost their jobs as a direct result of the growing competition from Japanese car imports. That Chin was not Japanese was not as important as his being Asian and therefore "foreign" and a threat. While not going to the violent extremes of some whites, many blacks nonetheless blamed immigrants for the loss of their jobs and frequently shared the belief that the government did more to protect the rights of immigrants than of some citizens. Despite periodic eruptions of anti-immigrant hysteria over the last few decades, whites nevertheless tend to mingle and mix more readily with Latinos and Asian Americans, particularly those sharing similar class positions, than they do with African Americans of any class. Regardless of what gains they have made, African Americans continue to be portrayed in the media as lazy, irresponsible, and criminal. To many Americans, "black" continues to signify virtually all of the negative traits that whites historically have ascribed to it. That much--and it is a lot--has not greatly changed. Gwen Andrade, a black community activist in Providence, Rhode Island, who is married to a Puerto Rican city council member, recently expressed the belief that Latinos too often side with whites because of their perception that "In America the further away from black you get, the better." (3) An embittered Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist whose studies of the damaging effect of segregation on black children greatly influenced the Brown decision, "when asked in 1995, 'what is the best thing for blacks to call themselves?' answered, 'white.'" (4)

Clark's disillusionment with the slow pace of change forty years after Brown reflected a deeper, more disturbing truism in our nation's history: whiteness is virtually a property right that confers upon its owner privileges denied to nonwhites. Immigrants have been quick to learn this lesson, and whites have become more willing to share the wealth with those who are deemed acceptably white. Whites often extol Asian Americans, many of whom achieve higher educational and occupational status than whites themselves, as the "model minority" and "honorary whites." Asian Americans' "foreignness"--which formed the basis, among other things, for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century and Japanese internment in the twentieth--does not weigh as heavily on Asian Americans today as it once did. Their steady ascent into the middle class, though by no means uniform for all Asian American groups, smooths the way for them to be accepted as "Americans" by whites and, at times, as whites. African Americans, by contrast, are often regarded as the permanent alien others in our society. After decades of desegregation plans, affirmative action, fair housing laws, equal employment opportunity laws, and a host of other legal and legislative remedies, African Americans continue to endure high unemployment and low-wage jobs, de facto segregated neighborhoods and schools, high rates of drug and alcohol addiction, and high crime and homicide rates. Our nation's prisons are filled with young black men, who are more likely to serve prison time than either Hispanic or white youths. According to one recent study, "a black boy born in 1991 stood a 29 percent chance of being imprisoned at some point in his life, compared with a 16 percent chance for a Hispanic boy and a 4 percent chance for a white boy." (5)

Progress in the long struggle for civil rights for black Americans is often measured according to the position of the observer. For many underemployed urban blacks, little progress has been made. Urban schools cannot compete with predominantly white suburban schools that draw upon a wealthier tax base than most minority-dominant urban districts. Although black parents can, theoretically, send their children to usually better schools in the white suburbs, in reality many black families cannot afford to do so or would prefer, like whites, to keep their children in neighborhood schools. Busing at first seemed like a solution to desegregation during the 1970s, but whites and blacks eventually defeated court-ordered busing plans because integration was coming at too great a cost to the children of both groups, who were often bused considerable distances from their homes. Another group of observers, the growing black middle class, measure the distance between 1954 and the present and are gratified that they have achieved a measure of economic success in spite of the odds.

But while black Americans continue to debate and discuss what progress has been made since Brown and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, many whites have come to the conclusion that blacks have been given an unfair advantage through affirmative action programs encouraged by the government. Since the 1960s affirmative action has been the single greatest weapon in the arsenal of integration in government, education, and the private sector. The results have been mixed, and after forty years of civil rights gains, the 1990s witnessed a backlash against affirmative action policies and programs. It was time, many whites and some blacks believed, to move beyond race to the colorblind Promised Land of the twenty-first century. State and federal courts increasingly ruled that affirmative action policies were unconstitutional violations of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a landmark decision in 1996, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the race-based affirmative action policy of the University of Texas Law School was unconstitutional, which prompted a wave of similar lawsuits against affirmative action in universities throughout the nation. (6) The effects of the ruling were stunning. The number of black students offered admission to the UT Law School dropped from sixty-five in 1996 to eleven in 1997--only four enrolled in a first-year class of more than four hundred. Latino enrollment in the law school was cut by more than half. (7) In the same year, 1996, California voted in favor of Proposition 209 to ban all affirmative action programs in the state. Efforts to argue that diversity was a compelling state interest fell on deaf ears until June 23, 2003, when the Supreme Court allowed the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions at the University of Michigan Law School as long as formulas were not used that awarded points for applicants' racial identities. In the court's five-to-four ruling, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion held that the United States Constitution "does not prohibit the Law School's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." (8) Nevertheless, university officials hesitate to use the phrase "affirmative action" because it has come to mean for a large segment of the white population that whites are being passed over in favor of unqualified minorities. Instead, officials stress the need for diversity as a compelling educational interest, echoing the argument not only of Justice O'Connor but also of Thurgood Marshall fifty years ago that integrated schools served a compelling psychological interest for black children as well as redressed a historical and constitutional injustice.

Even as the color line continues to be resolutely drawn between black and white, immigration and high fertility rates among the newer immigrants have changed the face of America in a way that could hardly be imagined, much less predicted, in 1954. Today diversity includes not only blacks and whites, but the growing numbers of Hispanics and Asian Americans in the population. Educators worry less about the need to include Asian Americans in colleges and universities, however, than they do about the diminishing pool of blacks and Latinos, who lag far behind the majority of whites and Asian Americans in rates of graduation from high school. According to the census in 2000, of the approximately 1.2 million black and Hispanic eighteen-year-olds in the United States, only about 631,000, or roughly half, graduated from high school, and of those only about 287,000, or 45 percent of the graduates, took the classes in math, science, language, and literature required to apply even to the least selective four-year colleges. Thus, only 24 percent of all black and Hispanic eighteen-year-olds in the U.S. met the minimum qualifications to apply to college. (9)

In Texas, the "pipeline" situation for African Americans in kindergarten through twelfth grade is even more dismal. The Texas Education Agency reported that in 2001 a total of 215,316 students graduated from public high schools in the state. African Americans made up 28,295 (13 percent) of that number, roughly equivalent to their percentage of the total population of the state. However, only 9,909, or about one-third, of all black graduates took the Scholastic Aptitude Test usually required for college admission. The number of those who earned a combined score of at least 900 on the SAT and graduated in the top 40 percent of their classes was 2,608 (or 9 percent of all black graduates). Only 1,630 blacks (6 percent) graduated in the top 20 percent of their classes with a combined SAT score of 900 or above. It gets worse. Only 783 blacks in the state, a mere 2.8 percent of all black high school graduates, graduated in the top 10 percent of their classes with a combined SAT score of at least 900. These students constituted the total pool of black students eligible for automatic admission to the state's flagship public universities, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University. This figure for blacks compares to 3.7 percent for Hispanic top-10-percent graduates (Hispanics represent 32 percent of all graduates), 9.3 percent for white graduates, and a whopping 21.3 percent for Asian Americans. (10) These data help explain why, despite decades of affirmative action at the University of Texas at Austin, only 3.4 percent of the student body is African American (1,734 out of a total of 51,426 students). (11) Most state universities serious about improving diversity on their campuses face similar problems in the primary and secondary education pipeline. Some institutions have sought to address the problem by establishing partnerships with high schools that have high minority populations. Other universities have created charter schools as feeder schools that offer intensive academic training, and those universities often provide full-ride financial aid packages to successful minority graduates of the charter schools.

It is clear that we have not succeeded in realizing the dream of integration in our public schools, and certainly our efforts to diversify our colleges and universities will not be successful until we address the issue of separate and unequal schooling in K-12 throughout the nation. On a deeper level, we will have to come to terms not only with our disappointing progress a half century after Brown but also with the legacy of white supremacy in the 150 years or more before Brown. But where do we go from here? Will the twenty-first century witness the narrowing of the social, economic, and educational gap between blacks and whites that frustrated virtually all attempts to close it in the twentieth century? Have we settled for a purely legal end to segregation, one in which the nation can rest comfortably that blacks are not denied the equal protection of the law even though they are, for the most part, little better off now than they were fifty years ago? What, in short, will it take to make Martin Luther King's dream of integration a reality and not just a possibility? If our nation is ever to move beyond race to a colorblind future, and I think it must, it will have to begin by euthanizing white privilege in the collective unconscious of America and reckoning with that "strange career" that still lingers in the sad story of seventy-eight-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who met her white father for the first time when she was sixteen and out of respect would not reveal the secret that would have destroyed his career and challenged the white supremacist convictions on which it was built.

(1) Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (1992; new ed., New York, 1995).

(2) Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

(3) Quoted in Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 359n71.

(4) Quoted in James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York and Oxford, 2001), 210.

(5) Guinier and Torres, Miner's Canary, 359-60n2.

(6) Hopwood v. Texas, 78 F.3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996).

(7) http://www.bamn.com/doc/factsheet.pdf (accessed February 3, 2004).

(8) Grutter v. Bollinger, 123 S.Ct. 2325, 2347 (2003), 288 F.3d 732 (6th Cir. 2002).

(9) Figures from Jay P. Greene and Greg Forster, "College Diversity: Fix the Pipeline First," Washington Post, January 7, 2004, p. A21.

(10) http://www.utexas.edu/student/admissions/research/Pipeline2001.pdf (accessed February 3, 2004).

(11) http://www.utexas.edu/academic/oir/statistical_handbook/03-04/students/ (accessed February 3, 2004).

MR. FOLEY is an associate professor of history and American studies, and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, at the University of Texas at Austin.