Public schools have served as sites of social, political, and legal contestation since their inception in the United States. And, while the pathways of racialized inequalities have arguably waxed and waned, threats of exclusion and segregation—constituted and governed by anti-Blackness—have cast a long shadow on the promise of educational equity. In response to the central provocation of the 2024 Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives symposium—revisiting Brown v. Board of Education and the struggle for racial equity in education—this Essay seeks to (re)connect the past and present. More directly, through the Critical Race Theory reform and retrenchment dialectic, it attends to the often-overlooked relationship between Brown (violent resistance to integration) and the persistence of physical racial segregation in K-12 classrooms across the country today. By inviting deeper reflection on the oppositional and hierarchical relationship of integration and segregation, this Essay draws on evidence from the historical record in three areas (framing of Blackness, legislation, and empirical data) to centralize how this interlock-ing dynamic wove an unbreakable fabric of exclusionary school discipline. In approaching Brown in this manner, we aim to elevate two claims. First, the criticalness of identifying exclusionary school discipline as what it truly is and has always been: state-sanctioned legal mechanisms of physical racial segregation functioning under the race-neutral guise of order and safety. As is true in other critiques of Brown, the race-neutral façade cloaking discipline perpetuates narratives of white innocence in the enactment of policies and practices that oppress schoolchildren of color. Second, that exclusionary school discipline legislation–– whether deployed in the years following Brown or advanced in the present day––is education retrenchment legislation that dispossesses children of their right to learn. In provoking a reflective conversation of racial equity and Brown, the praxis of Critical Race Theory challenges us to ask, “now what?” and act collectively against renewed forces that seek to further cement norms of exclusion in public education.

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