NEW BOOK BY GEORGETOWN LAW PROFESSOR SHERYLL CASHIN SAYS RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION HURTING BOTH AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND WHITES

For Immediate Release
April 16, 2004

Contact:
Greg Langlois, (202) 662-9500

(Photo by Rhoda Baer)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Fifty years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Georgetown University Law Center Professor Sheryll Cashin has written a new book warning that modern segregation – based on both voluntary separation and continued racial discrimination – thwarts citizens' dreams of living in safe, affordable communities with high-quality educational opportunities for their children.

In “The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream” (PublicAffairs Books, 2004), Cashin argues that, despite the Civil Rights Movement's successful elimination of state-sponsored racial segregation, public and private institutional policies continue to divide neighborhoods along racial and class lines. In addition, Cashin says, both white and black America have grown to accept de facto segregation – whites because segregation from minorities is often seen as necessary to ensuring better opportunities, and blacks simply from ambivalence to and weariness of integration.

This separation provides unequal opportunities to achieve a quality of life most Americans strive for – the ability to live in communities offering attractive neighborhoods, reasonable tax rates, low crime, good schools, and job opportunities, Cashin writes. Segregation sets up “winner” and “loser” communities, she says, with racial minorities and thepoor substantially locked out of the “winner” column (and middle-class whites finding it increasingly harder to stay in).

Cashin warns that continued segregation – whether by choice or longstanding policies – threatens to polarize the nation even further, at a time when coming together as one community would advance everyone's pursuit of the American Dream. Integration, not segregation, continues to be the answer, she says.

"In a rapidly diversifying America, the only way to stem our drift toward a ‘winner-take-all' society is to jettison the common assumption that separation is okay,” Cashin says. “Our public policy choices must be premised on an integrationist vision if we are to achieve the dream America says it embraces: full and equal opportunity for all.”

 

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