NAACP Annual Meeting
by Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson, a visiting distinguished professor of African-American Studies at Columbia University, is author most recently of ``Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line.''

THIS WEEK'S NAACP convention in Pittsburgh marks a watershed, both for the august civil rights group and for the way we all think about racial politics in America. Some weeks prior to the gathering, news reports surfaced that NAACP leaders planned to rethink perhaps their most time-honored and sacrosanct goal: the racial integration of American public schools.

This news is less shocking than it first appeared -particularly if we recall that the painful questions posed by integration really are at the center of the African-American experience. In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote that the monstrous gulf between our nation's claim of practicing democracy while denying it to blacks - along with the hypocrisy and hostility such a denial breeds - is "the American dilemma."

But for blacks, our real dilemma has been whether to integrate into American society - which, as James Baldwin said, without adequate black economic resources and white good will, is like integrating into a burning house. The alternative strategy, currently under debate among delegates to the NAACP convention is to preserve separate black institutions that would sustain our dignity and social identities.

In the abstract, our dilemma has been framed throughout black history as an ideological conflict, pitching integration against nationalism, racial assimilation against separatism. In practice, however, our choices have never been as pure or as rigid as such labels suggest. The history of black struggles against white oppression and structural inequality is steeped in ideological promiscuity, a frenetic and often heroic amalgamation of ad hoc strategies for black liberation.

But these hybrid strategies have also exacerbated the terms of the dilemma. American blacks have forged their daily lives in a zone of frustrating paradox, from which there is little, if any, relief. Even at the height of the civil rights movement, many of its leaders advocated integration as they presided over what was arguably the most successful nationalist institution ever: the black church. Meanwhile, many of the most ardent black nationalists have maintained their jobs in the white American mainstream, from coporations to universities.

Still, it can't be denied that the desegregation of public schools has symbolized, and in many ways defined, the aggressive integrationist mission of the NAACP. For many of the group's stalwarts, the fight to desegregate public schools - which culminated in the monumental 1954 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision, argued before the Supreme Court by then-NAACP lead counsel Thurgood Marshall - was a major stride in the bitter pilgrimage toward a truly just and integrated society. After all, black chiidren had been the victims of a two-tiered educational system sanctioned in the 1896 Supreme Court "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson.

After Brown, many believed that the nation would move, as the Supreme Court ordered, with "all deliberate speed" to create an equitable, racially balanced school system. But it was not until the hyperintegrationist policies of the early 1970s, especially court-ordered busing, that the ideal of an integrated school system was given more than emergency federal support. It's been rough traveling for the ideal of integration ever since.

Advocates of integration blame the ill fortunes of public school desegregation on the conservative turn in electoral politics. The country's meaner racial politics has, in turn, produced reversals in the judiciary, and raised the enormous cost, psychic and financial, of fighting de facto segregation in ostensibly desegregated school districts. These factors, coupled with everyday white hostility at the idea of artificial integration, have fueled a striking resegregation of public education for black and Latino children. While racial segregation dropped dramatically in the South between 1964 and 1972, and gradually in the West and Midwest between 1964 and 1989, segregation in public schools has once again increased in the South - and especially in the Northeast. In the Northeast, 70 percent of urban black and Latino students populate schools that enroll between 90 percent and 100 blacks and Latinos. By 1991, two-thirds of all black students, and nearly three-fourths of all Latinos, attended schools that were predominantly black and Latino; while one-third attended schools that were more than 90-percent black and Latino. These levels reflect the same proportions that existed prior to court-ordered busing in the early '70s.

These numbers have prompted onetime advocates of public school desegregation to question its effectiveness, while provoking its long-term critics to step up their demands for all-black schools. We might call this post-integration position "neoseparatism" - a stance that recognizes the reversals that integration has suffered without endorsing the sometimes-shrill utopian nationalism of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. The neoseparatist critics of integration argue that public school desegregation is a flawed strategy because it rests on what may be termed the proximity premise: Just being in the same classroom as white kids guarantees that black kids will get a quality education. The neoseparatists claim that the proximity premise ignores (among other factors) the current de facto resegregation of black and Latino kids in integrated schools.

The neoseparatists certainly have a point. Black and Latino children are consistently scapegoated and otherwise stigmatized in integrated settings. They are put on lower academic tracks than white children. They have higher suspension rates from school than the majority population. And in situations of borderline academic performance, they are more readily shunted to special education, remedial and compensatory classes than white children.

The neoseparatists also argue that the black Americans have been saddled with an unfair share of the burden of desegregation. Predictably, a far greater proportion of black students get bused from the inner city to suburban schools - thanks largely to the Supreme Court's 1973 Milliken vs. Bradley decision, which struck down "metropolitan" busing plans that moved students from suburban into urban school districts. The closing of financially strapped black schools and the firing and demotion of black educators have also accelerated the growth of separate and unequal schooling.

Equally poignant, the psychic tax on black children was severely underestimated in the strong push for desegregation. Segregated black schools provided a culture of expectation in which black students were taught that they could perform well despite radical social and economic inequalities. Of course, we must not romanticize black schools, which were often starved of economic support. And of course we should never forget the vicious culture of apartheid that enforced discriminatory educational practices.

But neither should we treat neoseparatist claims about the high value of black schooling as the misguided efforts of ethnosaurs or crackpots. Desegregation has produced serious and undeniable failures.

But neoseparatism comes with pitfalls of its own: Studies show that black students in integrated schools complete more years of schooling, are more likely to secure white-collar and professional employment and make higher wages than their segregated peers.

So what should we, and the NAACP, do? First, we should make a distinction between self-segregation, where groups choose to coalesce for mutual benefit, and the coercive racial segregation that was supported by social prejudice and sanctioned by law. If the ultimate goal is quality education for black children, we have a moral obligation to test a variety of means of achieving that purpose. If self-segregation is a viable option in helping some black children reach the pinnacle of their educational possibilities, this course must be responsibly supported.

Of course, we must match resources with remedies. This means that black schools should not merely be theaters for therapy - although an obvious desideratum for such schools is that they strengthen black students' self-esteem and will to perform. More important, however, is the imperative to reinforce the strengths of these black institutions as schools: places that promote disciplined learning and pedagogy, and equip black children for suitable employment and self-enjoyment.

We should be aware that arguments for self-segregation may be deployed by many white opponents of desegregation as an excuse to defund black education in integrated settings or to curtail severely the quest for justice in our public schools. Thus, we must also push for integrated education when such efforts have been hampered by administrative and political resistance to the law. Here we must make a fine but necessary distinction between desegregation and integration. The former is the absence of apartheid-like conditions that prohibit educational equity. The latter is the active pursuit of a multiracial educational politics that acknowledges the hybrid character of American identity and democracy.

Such careful distinctions can help us avoid the tired and in some ways false clash of ostensible opposites: separatists versus integrationists. One can believe in the ultimate politics of integration while affirming that one must practice, at least for a while, the self-affirming politics of self-segregation. No less an integrationist than the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., asserted just 10 days before his death that "temporary segregation" is necessary to put blacks "into a bargaining position to get to that ultimate goal, which is a truly integrated society where there is shared power." And as NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois said, blacks must never be "against association with ourselves because by that very token we give up the whole argument that we are worth associating with." On another occasion, DuBois with words worth quoting at length:

"What we must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries...is equally bad. Other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth. But other things seldom are equal, and in that case, Sympathy, Knowledge and the Truth outweigh all that the mixed school can offer."

If the NAACP's leaders proceed with sympathy, knowledge and truth into a provisional neoseparatist politics, we should appreciate that they are only continuing to work through the twinned American and African-American dilemmas. As such, a new position on desegregation would help us to redefine the terms of these dilemmas in a way that could be a model for the much-touted national "dialogue" on race. And in the long run, that may help us reach a point where other things could finally become equal.