by Madeline Roorbach, Junior, Grady High School
In almost all of my classes at
Grady High, students segregate themselves, sitting in row after row of hard plastic chairs according to race. It is, of course, a subconscious action, and completely unintentional—kids sit where their friends are. And in today’s society, friends tend to be of the same race.
In the 1960s, however, the phenomenon of sitting in class based on race wasn’t an issue because there were no different races in schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, considered the strongest civil rights bill in history, guaranteed black Americans access to all public businesses (such as restaurants and hotels) as well as the right to an equal public school system. However, although legal segregation no longer exists, now, more than forty years later, we still sit in school separated by race. That is my concern with my generation; I worry that society has still not fully integrated, and that America is not a place of equal prospects. And unfortunately, the window of opportunity appears to be closing.
In fact, an August 2007
Washington Post article stated that schools are starting to re-segregate. The article cites a 2002 study released by the University of California in Los Angeles, which analyzed the growing trend of schools—especially in the South where segregation and later forced integration were most widespread—to inadvertently re-segregate themselves. The study concluded that, because of growing levels of black and Latino students in the public school system, and the declining number of white children, schools have started down the path which only five decades ago Brown vs. Board of Education corrected—the basic right to schooling.
The study predicted that, because of the segregation, minorities would once again face sub-par education, thereby affecting job selection, thereby affecting the ability of minorities to succeed in today’s society.
That inability to succeed would only solidify, once again, white economic superiority simply by virtue of race. The U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent statistics illustrate an alarming fact: 24.5 percent of black families live below the poverty line. Only 8.2 percent of non-Hispanic white families live in the same conditions.
My generation needs to see this problem coming before it happens. Just as analysts predicted years in advance that the levees would not contain Lake Pontchartrain in the event of a hurricane and just as analysts predicted that the economy was failing two years ago, analysts are predicting that we will return to faux segregation.
My grandparent’s generation had the courage to fix the injustice and inequality in their young adult lives by integrating their society. I don’t know how to approach the need to a re-integration of schools; but I think we can start by the simple but significant step of integrating our classroom desks.
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