tl:dr Our school system is both racist and anti-racist, and it’s evidently more anti-racist than it is racist.
It’s well understood that the US schooling system is racist, in the sense that it perpetuates disparities between more privileged students and underprivileged students, who in turn are disproportionately African American. More privileged kids go to better schools, and underprivileged kids go to worse ones. With the racist nature of schooling agreed on, we can consider whether the school system is also anti-racist, and indeed it looks as though that’s the case.
Can a racist institution be at the same time anti-racist? Alternatively, to think that an institution can be only racist or only anti-racist is to engage in either-or thinking. Tema Okun famously identified either-or thinking as an aspect of “white supremacy culture”. I’m no expert on critical race theory, from which we get the “white supremacy” theory, but I sure agree with Okun that either-or thinking is bad news. It’s categorical thinking as opposed to empirical thinking, and it’s a recurrent cognitive bias and popular logical fallacy. If we reject either-or thinking, then it makes no sense to describe our school system as either racist or anti-racist. Any system that wide-ranging can easily have multiple results, some racist and others anti-racist.
With the inegalitarian failures of the school system in mind, can we think of anything anti-racist about the system? Imagine what would happen if we shut down the public school system tomorrow as a way to fight disparities between racial groups. If “school” is only racist, then “no school” would be anti-racist or at least less racist. If schools make things worse, then shuttering schools would make things better. Do schools make things worse? Without public schools, racial disparities would be even bigger than they already are. Parents with more privilege would use their resources to get their kids some education, one way or another. Underprivileged parents would have fewer such options or none, and the disparity in reading, math, and other basics would get wider, not narrower. Shuttering schools would make racism (that is, disparity) worse.
The school system is imperfect on an institutional level, but even with these imperfections it still reduces achievement disparities compared to what those disparities would otherwise be. If schools—relative to no schools—reduce racial disparities, then to that extent the system is effectively anti-racist. Can we compare the degree of racism in the system versus anti-racism? It’s hard to measure, but it’s easy to agree that underprivileged kids are better off with the system we have than they would be with no such system or alternative system in place. This thought experiment leads to the conclusion that schools are more anti-racist than they are racist.
Still, compared to a hypothetical school system that’s not racist at all, today’s system looks pretty bad. Everyone would benefit from the nation having a better school system, and to get there we need to understand the system we have now. Our challenge isn’t to dismantle a system that’s anti-racist, full stop. Our challenge is to build up the elements of the school system that are already anti-racist and to make the school system work better for the students who aren’t getting what they need from it. To reform schools effectively, we need to recognize the anti-racist side of the system.
