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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Is Black America Any Better After Integration?



Let's flesh out the entitled question. The supposition was posed in a recent article in the Kansas City The Call newspaper. What do you guys think? People of color have unquestionably made some significant strides post intergration but are we any better? Here's an excerpt from The Call:

Inclusion Or Not

Integration, as good as it was intended, has not fully been realized and the reason is simple as many state: white America isn’t ready to include you in everything.
Tamar Jacoby, author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration, clearly stated as a white female herself why the idea of integration, although good and successful in many ways, has become a backward spiral of hopelessness for those who desire to be included in the process:
“Only a tiny minority, black or white, have repudiated integration outright, but increasingly on both sides there is a new contrary mood. Some whites, tired of the issue and the emotion that comes with it, have grown indifferent to blacks’ problems. Others, black and white, think of integration as a sentimental notion, more or less irrelevant to the real problems of race in America -- black poverty, black joblessness, black advancement.”
While integration has led black America to the very top of institutions along with the ever talked about world such as sports and its African American coaches and general managers, still America is stingy in its dealings of inclusion.
Some would argue that black America has had enough. The diversity in America’s neighborhoods, schools, company offices and newspaper staffs should be enough.
But as many realize, separation, not equality continues.
In his book, Integration or Separation: A Strategy for Racial Quality, published by Harvard University Press, Roy L. Brooks states that the problem lies not only with white America’s resistance to “melt completely” with others that look different from them, but also, black America’s seemingly ignorance in recognizing it’s role when it comes to that inclusion.
As Brooks states in Integration or Separation: “For all its moral and political appeal, however, racial integration has been an unsuccessful civil rights strategy. It has not helped most African Americans achieve racial equality, by which I mean individual dignity and empowerment in American society. Racial integration has failed to live up to its wonderful billing in numerous ways. . .”
Those ways of course, education, housing, employment and government, although improved for many African Americans, still has left large gaps for those blacks seeking to be included.
According to Brooks in his book, “The integrated schools, such as they are, have failed to fulfill Brown’s expectations of healthier self-esteem and racial esteem, of academic performance among African American students substantially equal to that of white students, and of better racial relations within public schools and in the larger society. . .”


Check out the remainder of the above article below:

Is Black America Any Better After Integration?

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