August 2024
Martin Luther King (MLK) was not a fan of academic social science. However, he did praise one particular work for its profound insight. It was Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice, a work that validated King's emphasis on desegregation in the civil rights agenda.
Allport's "contact theory of prejudice" benefited from advances in empirical research. Surveys of military veterans showed that white men who served in units with black soldiers held more positive views of African Americans than veterans from all-white units. These findings were duplicated in studies of athletic teams, work-crews, merchant marine, and public housing.
Simply put, Allport's contact theory predicts a decline in racial prejudice when blacks and whites participate as equals in non-adversarial social engagements, especially cooperation toward a common goal.
Or restated negatively, the theory predicts that the structural separation of Blacks and Whites reinforces racial stereotypes and animosity. This version perfectly captures the social organization of the Jim Crow South. There, a system of legally mandated segregation, including occupational apartheid, reinforced virulent white prejudice and orchestrated interracial contact in a way that affirmed black inferiority. This explains why King put desegregation at the top of the civil rights agenda.
MLK's charismatic leadership of the civil rights movement nudged the Congress into passing equal rights legislation. The civil rights acts of 1964 through 1968 outlawed segregation in public accommodations, employment and housing.
So, from the 1950s through the 1970s, desegregation/integration reigned as the principal catchwords of civil rights (see chart). Then, around 1980, "desegregation" rapidly disappeared from the vocabulary of race relations.
Why the demise of MLK's agenda?
Efforts to enforce the new civil rights laws exposed the sorry fact that white northerners were more resistant to desegregation than suggested by public opinion surveys. The infamous example was the rage against "forced busing" as a remedy for segregated public schools. Equally unpopular were government programs to desegregate housing, such as situating low-income housing units in middle-class suburbs.
In other words, neighborhood/school desegregation became so politically treacherous that both parties retreated from enforcing it. In fact, the original Fair Housing Act exempted owner-occupied units from the anti-discrimination requirement. Richard Nixon and every President thereafter has curbed HUD's power to impose local reforms. Consequently most metro areas with large black populations are still highly segregated today.
Democrats' tacit acceptance of entrenched black ghettos undermined their reputation as champions of racial justice. Having abandoned MLK's integration agenda as a political loser, they pivoted to a narrative reminiscent of black power rhetoric. It's catchword was diversity (with "equity and inclusion" tacked on later).
Diversity without Integration
The showcase for the new narrative is the Higher Ed Industry, a Democrat Party fortress. But here, the term diversity has absolutely nothing to do with bringing Black and White students together. To the contrary, it's a diversity of tribal enclaves that sabotage interracial contact. In short, it's segregation with a woke blessing.
Hundreds of traditionally white institutions (TWI) have established segregated venues across all areas of campus life. These include racially separate graduation ceremonies, freshmen orientation programs, and "culturally themed" clubs and events. Some schools have gone so far as to offer racially distinctive residence halls and dining facilities; or at least "safe spaces" where White Europeans dare not tread.
However, Higher Ed's true champions of racial tribalism are the survivors of the Jim Crow era - Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). They arose to provide blacks with educational opportunities denied to them by white-only colleges prior to 1964. Yet, 70 years after "separate but equal" was overturned, most HBCUs remain dedicated to an Afrocentric mission at the expense of integration. (White enrollment has fallen since 1990).
Safetyism: Higher-Ed's woke rationalization for racial tribalism.
Segregation is reimagined as a safe space for tortured minorities. For example, Reed College justifies its racially themed dormitory at as an opportunity for "students of color to heal together from systemic White supremacy, recover the parts of ourselves and our cultures that have been stolen through colonization..."
More generally, a safe space is a setting where marginalized people of color can feel comfortable, where they are protected from the anxiety of minority status, academic competition, micro-aggressions, and the toxic penumbra of white privilege. Proponents claim that this supportive environment cultivates a sense of confidence and racial pride.
According to this ideology, the Supreme Court was wrong in ruling that a "separate but equal" education disadvantages black students.
To the contrary, the socioeconomic costs of segregation are enormous and well documented, as follows.
(1) The inhabitants of racial enclaves miss-out on the economic benefits of integration, such as an expansive network of friends that include higher income whites. Raj Chetty shows that such cross-class networks have a huge impact on economic mobility.
So it's no surprise that at HBCUs, where the formation of white friendships is minimized, graduates end up earning less money than matched counterparts at TWIs. The racial enclaves at TWIs have a similar effect: whites are missing from the friendship networks of blacks who wallow in "ethnically themed" dorms and clubs.
Also, It seems obvious that to successfully navigate a multicultural world, it helps to have contacts with people of different ethnicities, races, abilities and persuasions. For Blacks to succeed in a mostly white society, familiarity with the ways of white folks is more productive than monocultural immersion.
(2) Racial tribalism is the antithesis of a cosmopolitan university. It reinforces all the pathologies that integration and interracial contact aim to heal. It creates an echo chamber that reinforces stereotypical thinking and insulates the group from disconfirming information. It fosters a herd mentality. It makes race the overarching element of a person's identity rather than one facet among many. Extreme racial consciousness primes both groups to see the worst in each other, and thereby stokes mutual suspicion and hostility. The majority is tuned to see evidence of the minority's inferiority, while minority members are primed to read malevolence into every utterance by whites.
These costs offer a compelling argument for requiring public colleges and universities to foster racial integration instead of tribalism.
Unfortunately, these Democrat Party strongholds have a strong incentive to ignore the wisdom of MLK. That's because segregation, both on and off campus, benefits the Party's embrace of "identity politics." Racial segregation mobilizes the power of social pressure to reinforce Blacks' identification with, and allegiance to, the Democrat Party.
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