A Review of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness Book Review
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University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Connecticut Law Review School of Law 2013 Integration Reclaimed: A Review of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness Book Review Michelle Adams Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/law_review Recommended Citation Adams, Michelle, "Integration Reclaimed: A Review of Gary Peller's Critical Race Consciousness Book Review" (2013). Connecticut Law Review. 229. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/law_review/229 CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW VOLUME 46 DECEMBER 2013 NUMBER 2 Book Review Integration Reclaimed: A Review of Gary Peller’s Critical Race Consciousness MICHELLE ADAMS Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. Today, more Americans are committed to integration than ever before. Yet this attachment to integration is hardly robust. There is a widespread perception that integration has failed. A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic resources are spent on integration. At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the “left” criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and culture. Scholars from across the political spectrum have sought to explain this disconnect and to assess the possibilities of integration as a political program, moral ideal, and social agenda. In his recent book, Critical Race Consciousness: Reconsidering American Ideologies of Racial Justice, Professor Gary Peller joins this robust and ongoing conversation. Peller’s central claim is not that integration has had too little influence over the shape of racial equality and social policy, but that it has had too much. One must him credit for intervening in this important discussion. Peller’s intervention is to argue for a muscular, nuanced, and sophisticated understanding of black nationalism as it posed an ideological alternative to integration. His central achievement is to add value to the scholarly discussion about a critical issue: What is the meaning of racial justice, and did (and does) integration help us achieve it? Ultimately, however, Peller’s argument was not convincing. His capture of integration as having footing solely in individualistic race neutrality is problematic for at least three reasons. First, it misses the 725 structural dimensions of the integration ideology. Instead, integration is actually quite radical because of its laser-like focus on racial segregation, which structures, maintains, and perpetuates inequality across virtually every indicia of social, political, educational, and economic well-being. Second, it misconstrues the extent to which integration has been accepted as a goal in the United States. Third, it mischaracterizes the extent to which integration, as distinguished from an ideology of individualistic race neutrality, has led to current views of equal protection law. In this Book Review, I support my critique of Critical Race Consciousness, and my affirmative claim about the virtues of integration by referencing history, legal analysis, and current debates about how best to achieve racial equality. BOOK REVIEW CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 729 II. CRITICAL RACE CONSCIOUSNESS: THE CRITIQUE ...................... 736 A. INTEGRATIONISM: DEFINITION AND CRITIQUE ................................... 736 B. PELLER’S VISION OF MODERN BLACK NATIONALISM ......................... 739 III. INTEGRATION RECLAIMED ............................................................ 742 A. INTEGRATION AS A RADICAL APPROACH TO RACIAL INEQUALITY ...... 742 B. REASSESSING THE EFFECT OF INTEGRATION ON EQUAL PROTECTION LAW ................................... 753 IV. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 759 Integration Reclaimed: A Review of Gary Peller’s Critical Race Consciousness MICHELLE ADAMS∗ I. INTRODUCTION Integration occupies a contested and often paradoxical place in legal and public policy scholarship and the American imagination. It often is characterized as “[t]he nation’s official civil rights policy”1 and as the “ultimate definition of racial justice.”2 Most whites (and blacks) embrace the principle of racial equality and integration.3 Thus, the “norm holds that black Americans deserve the same treatment as whites, and in addition, that racial integration in all public spheres of life is a desirable goal.”4 Today, more Americans are committed to integration than at any time in the past.5 Yet, this attachment to integration is hardly robust. While blacks support integration, they do not “crave” it.6 There is a widespread perception that integration has “failed.”7 A vanishingly small percentage of social and economic (including federal budgetary) resources are spent ∗ Professor of Law and Co-Director, Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School. This Book Review was made possible by the generous financial support of the Cardozo Law School Summer Research Stipend Program. I would like to thank Rachel Godsil, Tristin Green, Thomas Healy, Randall Kennedy, Robin Lenhardt, Melissa Murray, Laura Nelsen, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Alex Reinert, Zelma Rios, Kate Shaw, Catherine Smith, and Peggy Smith for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this Book Review. Finally, I extend thanks to Martina Davis, Kyle Epstein, and Jason Starr for outstanding research assistance. 1 ROY L. BROOKS, INTEGRATION OR SEPARATION?: A STRATEGY FOR RACIAL EQUALITY 1 (1996). 2 GARY PELLER, CRITICAL RACE CONSCIOUSNESS: RECONSIDERING AMERICAN IDEOLOGIES OF RACIAL JUSTICE, at xiv (2011). 3 Lawrence D. Bobo & Camille Z. Charles, Race in the American Mind: From the Moynihan Report to the Obama Candidacy, 621 ANNALS AM. ACAD. POL. & SOC. SCI. 243, 245 (2009). 4 HOWARD SCHUMAN ET AL., RACIAL ATTITUDES IN AMERICA: TRENDS AND INTERPRETATIONS 311–12 (1997). 5 SHERYLL CASHIN, THE FAILURES OF INTEGRATION: HOW RACE AND CLASS ARE UNDERMINING THE AMERICAN DREAM 11–12 (2004). 6 Id. at xii. 7 See, e.g., BROOKS, supra note 1, at 1 (“For all of its moral and political appeal, however, racial integration has been an unsuccessful civil rights strategy.”); Eric Foner & Randall Kennedy, Reclaiming Integration, NATION, Dec. 14, 1998, at 11, 11 (“Books continue to appear with the word [integration] in their titles, but most seem resigned to integration’s failure, treating it as an ongoing ‘ordeal’ or seeking to allocate blame for the nation’s departure from integrationist principles.”). 730 CONNECTICUT LAW REVIEW [Vol. 46:725 on integration,8 and the Obama Administration’s record on integration has been mixed.9 Conservatives recently have urged the repeal of laws that provide funding to integrate public schools and have provided significant financial support to elect school board members who oppose integration.10 At the same time, some progressives and those who would otherwise consider themselves on the “left” criticize integration as insufficiently attentive to economic equality and dismissive of black identity and 8 Integration is the public policy solution that dare not speak its name. See Bob Herbert, Op-Ed., Separate and Unequal, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 21, 2011, at A27 (arguing that while integration is “[o]ne of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of black and Hispanic public school students . [i]t has become a political no-no”); see also NAT’L COALITION ON SCH. DIVERSITY, FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR SCHOOL INTEGRATION: A STATUS REPORT 1 (2012), available at http://www.school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityIssueBriefNo4.pdf (reporting that while “[t]he Secretary of Education has expressed strong support for school diversity and reduction of racial isolation in speeches . support for school integration is not yet reflected in the requirements and point systems of many key [departmental] competitive grant programs, where it might make the most difference”); James E. Ryan, The Supreme Court and Voluntary Integration, 121 HARV. L. REV. 131, 142 (2007) (“[I]ntegration has not been seriously pursued in most [public school] districts for over two decades.”); Steve Bogira, Separate, Unequal, and Ignored, CHI. READER (Feb. 10, 2011), http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicago-politics-segregation-african-american-black-white- hispanic-latino-population-census-community/Content?oid=3221712 (stating that segregation has “largely disappeared from the nation’s agenda”). 9 See Richard Kahlenberg, Does Obama Believe in School Integration?, TAKING NOTE (Nov. 17, 2009), http://takingnote.tcf.org/2009/11/does-obama-believe-in-school-integration.html (asserting that after ten months in office, the Obama Administration had not shown a significant commitment to school integration); When Will the Government Actually Fight “The Battle of Westchester?,” ANTI- DISCRIMINATION CTR. (May 15, 2012), http://www.antibiaslaw.com/westchester-false-claims- case/when-will-government-actually-fight-battle-westchester (reporting on a recent federal district court decision finding Westchester County in breach of a historic consent decree that requires it to end residential segregation and existing patterns of racial exclusion throughout the county, and asserting that “the federal government is still failing to treat the consent decree as the binding federal court order that it is, and has yet to hold Westchester to account for its continuing violations of each and