Segregation now.

This issue was initially proposed and developed by Shafali Lal, Radical Teacher editorial collective member, before her death last July. Shafali's experience as a teacher, scholar, activist, and woman of color in the academy all informed her work on an unfinished dissertation entitled Sentimental Science: Children, Social Science, and the Meaning of Race, 1939-1968. (Some of her work from that dissertation appears in Radical Teacher #69, "Progressive Education," in an article entitled "1930s Multiculturalism: Rachel Davis DuBois and the Bureau for Intercultural Education.")

In Shafali's work on twentieth-century American educational and psychological debates over race, she wrote about researchers and educators involved in developing theories of racial identity formation, among them researchers Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose findings on African-American identity formation were used as evidence in Brown v. Board of Education. The painfully unfinished nature of her project echoes the pain evident in recent conferences and journals reflecting on the unfinished work of Brown after 50 years of "all deliberate speed" in its implementation. Progressive educators find themselves, in looking back at Brown, with more questions than answers. What has the legal strategy of integration accomplished in schools? Is integration still the central goal it seemed to be 50 years ago? Are there other, more effective routes to educational equity? What can we do to keep working towards racial justice in schools at a time when past victories no longer appear victorious? Most reflections on Brown and its legacy are forced to confront the durability of white supremacy in the U.S..

Shafali's original title for this issue was "'Post'-Race," highlighting the unamusing irony of teaching about race at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, according to the progressive schedule of an imagined liberal history, we shouldn't be having this conversation at all. The problem of the color line was conceived as the problem of the last century. And at midcentury, events such as Brown heralded an end to racial divisions in education. However, despite decades of social, political, and legal activism and advocacy around educational equity and diversity, classrooms today are still persistently segregated and racial discrimination continues to affect educational outcomes. As Shafali's call for papers framed it:

   While scholars in a variety of disciplines have
   recognized that race is socially constructed,
   minorities continue to experience the impact
   of racialist thinking in schools, colleges, and
   universities across the nation. How can progressive
   teachers understand these dual trends
   towards increasing local and national diversity
   alongside persistent racial and ethnic discrimination?
   What impact has the entry of
   immigrants and minorities as students and
   teachers had on classroom theory and practice?

Although Shafali's work looked back to Brown and its vision of color in black and white, her work also focused on the parallel racial history of immigration into the country and its public schools, which aimed fairly explicitly to assimilate immigrants into the American workforce. After more than a century of this brand of immigrant education, the needs of nonnative speakers are in many places legislated against as a threat to the functioning of schools, and new laws have sprung up to "protect" English as the language of instruction. Cultural marginalization and erasure feature as much in the life of schools as does racial division.

Even though most of us think of race as social construction, its constructedness does not diminish its power to harm. This harm is evident in the essays in this issue on the racial "achievement gap," pressures on academics of color, the ghettoization of "racial" literatures, and the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of professional development and mentorship by experienced teachers of color. This issue of Radical Teacher explores ways in which, in the face of a nominal victory over segregation in Brown and the "exposure" of race as a social construction, teachers working in enduringly real settings of division and disparity can effectively teach about, and within, institutionalized racial injustice. These articles examine race and education from a perspective of local optimism in the face of global frustration. For the most part, these essays do not attempt to chart larger narratives about whether and when desegregation--of schools, classrooms, budgets or curriculum--will occur. They focus instead on thinking creatively in educational settings of racial inequality.

Productive models for thinking about and working in segregated schools do not all follow the same logic, nor is this necessarily a problem. The intense symbolic and practical burden on schools to perpetuate and/or resolve institutionalized inequality of all kinds leaves educators with plenty of work to do. Contributors write about their experiences negotiating, even fostering differences of opinion about what it means to teach about race. These articles address ways to work within constricted, compromised circumstances for racial equity in curricula, classrooms, and schools.