Brown v. Board of Education: Enduring Caste and American Betrayal

Authors

Sheryll Cashin, Georgetown University Law CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

This article reflects on the role of residential caste in reproducing school segregation and how the Supreme Court betrays the equality principles of Brown by applying a colorblind constitutionalism that renders so-called de facto residential caste, and subsequent school segregation, acceptable.

During the seven-decade Great Migration of the 20^th century, northern cities deployed policies to create an architecture of inequality in which African Americans and white Americans did not live in the same neighborhoods. While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 rendered intentional discrimination in housing markets illegal, and the Court also ruled against forms of intentional housing discrimination, the ostensibly race-neutral habits of residential caste continue unabated throughout the nation. In the 21^st century, public and private institutions reify poverty-free and poverty-concentrated spaces through three anti-Black, though facially neutral practices: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding, and stereotype-driven surveillance. The two most persistent types of neighborhoods are affluent, majority-white, high-opportunity areas and at the other extreme, majority-minority “hoods” of concentrated poverty that are chronically under-resourced. This residential dynamic and the Court’s allegiance to a colorblind understanding of Brown and the Fourteenth Amendment result in separate and unequal schools and worse outcomes for children of color.

Contrary to the vision of Brown in which the common public school is the site of shared, pluralistic learning and inculcation of common values of citizenship, the article also summarizes the political weaponization of Brown and conservative legislative assaults on public education. The article concludes that our best hope of overcoming residential caste and creating well-resourced, integrated public schools is continuing to build and support local laboratories of multiracial democracy that reject the pathologizing of those trapped in communities of concentrated poverty.

Publication Citation

Forthcoming in The American Journal of Law and Equality (MIT Press, Fall 2024).

Scholarly Commons Citation

Cashin, Sheryll, "Brown v. Board of Education: Enduring Caste and American Betrayal" (2024). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 2618.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2618