Wilson: Segregation and Religion and Race

Erika Wilson, scholar, law professor (and dabbler in that scary CRT stuff), has a new piece in the Yale Law Review. I've read Racialized Religious School Segregation so that you don't have to, but you ought to. Granted, it reads like the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the Yale Law Review, but that's what you get when you get a plate instead of a bowl of twinkies. There's a lot to chew on here, and I want to pull out some of the highlights.

Wilson is looking at school choice in the wake of Carson v. Makin, the case in which SCOTUS cemented the notion that states must include religious schools in any sort of voucher-ish program, even if those schools are discriminating in ways that no public school would never accept. Here's her main point.

The central claim of this Essay is that racial integration of public schools—though much maligned—is indispensable to moving America’s democracy away from its exclusionary origins and into a well-functioning, racially inclusive democracy. Choice in the private market exacerbates inherent and unresolvable tensions between school choice and racial integration. School choice generally operates against a backdrop of racial pluralism, racial subordination, and racial power imbalance that puts choice in tension with principles of equality, tolerance, and universal citizenship. Expanding school-choice options to include private religious schools is likely to exacerbate these tensions in ways that threaten the possibility of moving into a functioning multiracial democracy.

It occurs to me that in this context, the agitation against critical race theory makes another kind of sense (beyond eroding trust in public education) as a pre-emption against any arguments about choice-driven segregation ("That's just more of that CRT stuff").

The first section of the essay looks at the history of school segregation and the importance to democracy of integration efforts. It's the section that's going to make some people tetchy.

School integration undoubtedly requires Black and brown students to bear heavy costs. But given the realities of white supremacy, the costs of not pursuing integrated schools are even greater. Pursuing integration sets a path toward disrupting the racial subordination that is inherent to segregation in America. Because of America’s history of white supremacy, segregation in America makes material and social equality impossible.

Section II looks at how school choice has not helped, and digs down into the ways that school choice works counter to democracy itself. The market does not bend that way.

School choice is supposed to reform public education by creating a marketplace of schools and allowing families to shop for a school. But in doing so, it situates students as consumers rather than as citizens. It shifts the purpose of public education away from cultivating citizens for American democracy toward furnishing a marketplace through which individual consumers can gain economic, social, and political advantage. To the extent the school-choice model engages with democracy, it defines democracy through the lens of freedom, reasoning that democracy should afford citizens the freedom to choose schools free from state regulation. School choice furthers values like liberty, autonomy, privacy, and competition. In contrast, school integration furthers values like equality, tolerance, and citizenship training.

Emphasis mine. Wilson looks at three ways that the tension between these models causes issues. Let me pull those three points out.

First, under the school-choice model, parents are not required to consider how their choices impact the broader community. Parents instead select schools that fit their preferences, even if that preference is for a school that teaches discrimination, intolerance, or myopic American history.

Second, parents of different racial and socioeconomic groups use school choice differently. Parents select schools that reflect either their ability to exercise social privilege and power or the limits of the institutional context in which their choices are being made.

Finally, racialized power dynamics place true choice out of reach for marginalized Black and brown students.

Put another way, the fewer resources parents have, the fewer choices a school choice system offers them, and the more they make choices based on circumventing the barriers built into the system. 

Section III looks at the intersection between choice, religion and segregation. This, again, gets rather academic in language, but the idea is solid enough--that in the US, many religions "are not organized solely around a collection of spiritual beliefs; many are also organized around social and political viewpoints." 

We've seen a ton of this over the past decade. Obama isn't really an American, isn't really a Christian. Trump, somehow despite all evidence to the contrary, is an instrument of God/Jesus. What are the odds that this effect spills over into schools that select only "real Christians" for their student body?

Wilson discusses the old objections--public schools have a terrible track record on segregation, so what's wrong a choice school that also segregates Brown and Black students if it gives them a good education (answer: it probably doesn't).

Section IV (yes, this essay is not short) considers the struggle between racialized religious segregation and American democracy.

American democracy is under attack. Though the attacks are multifaceted, one of the largest threats is the rise of racial and religious balkanization. The Court’s decision in Carson may significantly exacerbate the balkanization. As Justice Breyer noted, allowing religion into the public-school system increases the risk of social strife and division. Proliferation of school choice that creates racialized religious segregation will result in students being siloed, unexposed to the diverse array of persons that inhabit America. The net result will be a decrease in social solidarity and cohesion, elevating risks of internal upheaval and violence. Violence resulting from the insurrection at the Capitol, attempts to prohibit teaching about the history of race and discrimination in America, and the protests over extrajudicial killings of Black people by the police epitomize the dangers of existing balkanization. The insurrection at the Capitol wherein the participants made explicit calls to Christian nationalism presages how adding religion to the layers of balkanization could endanger America’s democracy.

The opposite of the CATO Institue argument, which is that public school is a hotbed and argument and the only way to bring peace to the country is to let everyone retreat to their own educational silos where they don't have to get in fights with people who are different. Something that, as Wilson points out, we've been trying on an ad hoc basis and which is not working out particularly well.

Choice, she warns, also creates the growth of tiers of education,

Allowing school choice to be contoured by religion and race opens up the possibility for the dominant racialized religion to be used as a sorting metric that enhances the relative value of some students’ education while devaluing the education of others. Put another way, certain kinds of religious education could become sought-after status markers that are unavailable to those who are not part of the dominant race or religion.

There's a lot more to this piece, and you may not buy all of it, but it's still a thought-provoking work, worth a read. You can find the whole piece here.