On March 20, Donald Trump issued an executive order promising to “dismantle the Department of Education,” something he promised to do in his campaign. I saw a wide range of reactions from centrists, liberals and leftists, but for some reason none of them came out and said it: this is a deliberately racist action. Racists understand it, because it’s something they’ve wanted for decades, and Trump is happy to do it.
Many years ago I spent a year in North Carolina and worked in an IT job. I was taking an independent study on research methods in grad school, so I asked some of my co-workers, twentysomething white guys, if they’d be willing to participate in a sociolinguistic interview. I asked them all what high school they went to, and none of them responded with any of the local public high schools.
All these white guys said they attended the local Christian Academy. I thought that was a bit odd, because none of them seemed particularly religious, just a few years out of high school, and filed it away in my mind. Years later I found the answer: most towns in the South have these “Christian Academies” and they’re also called segregation academies.
When the civil rights fighters of the sixties won several victories against official segregation policies, racists didn’t just fight back using the Ku Klux Klan. They turned their private, religious schools into instruments of segregation.
I think it’s important here to pause and point out why racists hate integrated schools. It’s partly because they want to make sure that white kids always have more education than kids who aren’t white. It’s partly because they want to control the messages that kids are taught. But it’s also because kids in schools tend to get to know their classmates as peers, and that can lead to equal interracial relationships. And those can undermine the racial hierarchy.
Of course, there have been interracial relationships for all of human history, and there are structures enforcing segregation and racial hierarchies within schools. But the fact that children of different races are likely to spend time together in class, in the cafeteria, in libraries, teams and clubs means that they’re more likely to develop friendships and romantic relationships than if they just encounter each other in work and service situations, which are often explicitly structured to reinforce hierarchies.
Here in New York we use municipal and neighborhood boundaries for segregation, especially in suburbs like Levittown and Bronxville, but even, as Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have documented, in places like Brooklyn Heights and the Upper West Side. It took me years to realize that “good schools” was usually code for schools without too many nonwhite children. And this is practiced in the South as well.
In New York we also use religious schools for segregation, and that’s obvious for Orthodox Jewish schools, but it’s a bit more subtle for Christian schools, since many of the Catholic orders who run schools view their missions as including nonwhite students. Catholic schools here often have a similar racial mix to the public schools, but significantly whiter. They also are not required to take any student, so they can use the threat of expulsion to enforce all kinds of “traditional” hierarchies.
Municipal and neighborhood segregation results in segregated schools funded by public taxes, but under current law, segregation by religious schools requires them to be funded through church tithes and other contributions, or through private tuition. Meanwhile, parents who are paying tithes and tuition for religious schools are more or less required to fund the education of other kids, many of whom are likely to not be white.
This is why racists care so much about school vouchers, an issue that mystified me for years. Vouchers put public tax money back in the control of people who run private schools, especially the racists who run the segregation academies.
But what the racists would like even better is to completely dismantle the whole apparatus that was set up in the mid-twentieth century to enforce laws against segregation, to promote integration, and to fund education for all. They want to return to a system where the highest priority for school taxes was educating white kids, and the nonwhite kids got whatever was left over, if anything. A system where white kids were kept away from any nonwhite kids who might have a chance to earn their respect and admiration. And where the local racists were empowered to control the curriculum.
This is why they want to destroy the federal Department of Education. It’s a goal that Donald Trump, who was educated at a (non-sectarian) private school here in Queens, sympathizes with, and is happy to deliver for them.
