The "Northern Strategy" and the end of integration

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The “Northern Strategy”

Gloria Ladson-Billings is one of the most distinguished scholars of education in the US. I think about her work often, especially because of her role in introducing critical race theory to the world of education scholarship. (You should read the article. It’s not that long!) The political climate today is decidedly hostile to critical race theory, often misrepresenting it to create cover for a conservative political project aiming to undo civil rights protections. That might lead you to think that critical race theorists are supportive of the legal changes that resulted from the civil rights movement, but you’d be mistaken. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of critical race theory is an understanding that school integration was, at least partly, a failure.

In 2019, I attended a talk Gloria Ladson-Billings gave at Teachers College titled, It’s ALL de Jure: Turning a critical eye on the Northern Strategy. Many are familiar with the idea of the Southern Strategy, Nixon’s political bet that appealing to Southern Democrat’s along racial lines could convince many of them to vote Republican. Ladson-Billings pointed out that the perception of racism as a Southern problem overshadowed another kind of racism that existed in the Northern states, something she called the Northern Strategy.

The Northern Strategy, she argues, was as much de jure (meaning by law) as explicit racial segregation seen in the South. The Northern Strategy, while not directly labeling race as a criterion by which the law conceptualized citizens, still held disparate racial impacts, especially on the African American population. She brings up examples like placing highways through the middle of Black neighborhoods, white flight, school district zoning, high school admissions tests in New York City, school vouchers and school choice in Milwaukee and New Orleans, and many more. You can watch and get the full argument, but her point is that the law doesn’t have to explicitly say “do segregation” and it did accomplish segregation. She was, in part, calling out the northern urban liberals and progressives who thought that they were somehow not complicit in segregation just because of the civil rights movement.

Regretting a failed Brown

My post today, however, is not about evaluating her speech. Instead, I want to highlight a moment during the Q&A where she expresses a belief that has also appeared in her writing over the years: that the pre-Brown system of “separate but equal” was, in some ways, preferable to the failures of post-Brown integration.

She goes on to point out that Brown was the right decision but that it was never a decision fully about education because of the national context at the time. In part, Brown let the US present an image of equality to combat Soviet propaganda. In part, Brown avoided making state and local governments fully and equally fund the segregated systems for Black kids set up by Plessy. (How’s that for another confirmation of Raised to Obey’s thesis?) As she reminds us of several times in the speech and in many articles, Brown led to the closure of Black schools, reallocating funds to the nearby white schools, put thousands of Black teachers, administrators, and staff out of work, and broke up Black student populations to be distributed among white schools that would stay majority white (at least until white flight kicked in). Ladson-Billings, like other critical race theorists, argues that desegregation primarily benefitted whites. I’ll let my biases creep in here a little bit, but I suspect that integration was actually quite beneficial to Black students, and I am not sure it’s totally clear-cut that white kids got all the benefits. Certainly, the data exist somewhere and I’ll have to look into that more deeply. Still, that should not stop us from acknowledging that something important and meaningful to Black communities was lost due to desegregation.

What Ladson-Billings expresses here is no longer a niche view confined to legal scholars and educators who subscribe to critical race theory’s explanatory framework. Justin Driver, himself a legal scholar at Yale, highlighted the rise of skeptics of Brown vs BOE in a recent Atlantic article. At its center is a review of the book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children. The author, Noliwe Rooks, is chair of African American studies at Brown University and a widely respected academic who makes a similar case to that of Ladson-Billings. “The dream of widespread integration became a tepid desegregation,” Rooks writes, “wherein as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Driver points to others who advance this viewpoint today but also mounts a stirring defense of integration efforts. First and foremost, he asks, is why the people who succeeded despite segregation worked so tirelessly to end it. A good question, I think.

It’s Scholastic Alchemy

My goal today wasn’t really an evaluative one. I’m not here to test critical race theory against any other explanatory offerings or decide whether Noliwe Rooks’ book is good or bad or whatever. My main point is that we’ve seen a slow change for decades in the acceptance of integrated schools. I’ve made the observation previously that many of the school reform efforts we see today are aimed at either funding religious schools or allowing for more segregated schools. What I didn’t point out then is that this is not only a position held by the conservatives who are currently dismantling the Department of Education and passing voucher laws in red states. Some on the left are also coming around to the view that Brown and the civil rights movement more broadly have failed. And I dunno, maybe it has? One consequence of this view, though, seems to be a frustration with or even rejection of some of the principles that underpinned the fight for civil rights. I think the actual critical race theorists are careful to point out that they do not reject those principles — for example, that integration is good in theory. Rather, they have lost faith in our nation’s ability to make good on the promises of integration. Still, this makes them odd bedfellows with today’s conservatives but bedfellows they are. If that’s not scholastic alchemy, I don’t know what is. As sympathetic as I am to the plight of Black and Brown children in America’s schools, I am worried about what may result from the present right-wing movement discovering that, actually, “Black people want segregation” or some strategic oversimplification of the issue.