Minorities | Introduction
For much of its history, American society separated whites from minorities. In the 1800s, for example, white settlers seeking land forced many Native Americans to move to reservations. Jim Crow laws required whites and blacks to use separate public facilities as recently as the 1960s. Social customs and local ordinances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often insisted that Hispanic Americans and people of Asian descent live in racially segregated neighborhoods. Even white ethnic minorities—Jews and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—were excluded from many residential areas until the middle of the twentieth century.
Numerous historians argue, however, that segregation by law and by custom has had its most profound impact on African Americans. As proof, they point to the fact that the status of African Americans has been the subject of much of the controversy and legislation involving race. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, for example, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a state law calling for “separate but equal” facilities for whites and blacks in railroad cars. According to Joe R. Feagin, coauthor of Living with Racism: The Black Middle- Class Experience, “De Jure (by law) racial segregation in America was strengthened by this decision. For more than 50 years, many states used the ‘separate but equal’ rule to segregate the races in public schools, and in the use of transportation, recreation, sleeping, and eating facilities.”
By 1940, deeply entrenched patterns of segregation separated whites and blacks in almost every area of life. However, public sentiment concerning race relations began to change in the years following World War II, and a movement involving civil rights organizations, labor unions, and churches started battling against the system of segregation. Arguing that segregation was discriminatory because facilities for blacks were inferior to facilities for whites, civil rights activists organized protests, demonstrations, and boycotts in support of desegregation. In the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared that racially segregated public education was “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. Several states and cities passed statutes that made racial discrimination in housing and in employment illegal, and in 1964, the federal Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in most privately owned public facilities.
Racial integration remained the goal of most civil rights activism from the 1960s through the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, though, many people began to question the outcome of efforts to bring the races together. Integrationist efforts, some commentators maintain, actually require blacks to assimilate into white society to become successful. These critics argue that when assimilation occurs, minorities abandon their own culture to adopt the customs and mores of the dominant society. This process, they insist, does not guarantee justice or equal treatment for the minority population. “Instead of equality,” contends Sojourners editor Jim Wallis, “integration has meant selective assimilation for middle-class blacks while the urban underclass and rural poor are simply left behind. . . . [Integration] has always been and continues to be on white terms.”
Others claim, furthermore, that integration has weakened the spirit of autonomy and community among African Americans. Before the advent of desegregation, these critics assert, blacks pooled resources and built strong communities and cultural institutions that allowed them to feel pride in their own achievements. Various commentators contend that the promise of success through integration has, ironically, lured many blacks away from the task of helping other blacks, resulting in the deterioration of formerly powerful African American institutions. According to Tony Brown, author of Black Lies, White Lies, integration has “diabolically . . . taught blacks not to want to go to school with one another, not to want to live with one another, and not to spend money with one another.” For these reasons, some black leaders advocate abandoning integrationist efforts and returning to black self-reliance to benefit the African American community.
On the other hand, supporters of integration contend that its critics misunderstand the difference between assimilation and integration. While they agree that assimilation entails minorities’ acculturating to the majority culture, they argue that this is not the true goal of integration. The real aim of integration, they maintain, is to transform American society into a multiracial democracy. According to John A. Powell, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School, ideally integration “allows the views and experiences of both the dominant group and minority groups to meet, informing and transforming each other.” Joseph Lowery, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, agrees with Powell, asserting that integration “is not the systematic movement of all things black into all things white. It is the emphatic movement of all things wrong into all things right.” In the opinion of Powell, Lowery, and other proponents of integration, then, integration does not require the abandonment of black cultural values and allegiances; rather, black cultural values help inform the multiethnic conversation that aims to create a more egalitarian America.
Whether integration has benefited minorities and American society continues to be a subject of debate among politicians, educators, and lawmakers. Minorities: Current Controversies explores this issue as well as arguments concerning discrimination against minorities, the state of race relations, public policies designed to aid minorities, and the effects of changing racial demographics on American society. Examining these topics will illuminate today’s dialogue between America’s minority and majority cultures.
