Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation
by Beverly Daniel Tatum
Summary
Beverly Daniel Tatum’s first book in a decade begins with a warning call. A self-described “integration baby"—she was born in 1954—Tatum, now president of Spelman College, takes stock of the evidence of the increasing and underreported resegregation of American schools, even over the past decade.
As “meaningful opportunities for cross-racial contact are diminishing”, what are the implications—not only for schools, but for all of us, for our democracy? And what can we do as educators, citizens, and friends?
Can We Talk about Race? will be welcomed as a major contribution to the conversation not only about race in schools but about the future of American democracy.
Excerpt
From the Introduction
When I was invited in the summer of 2005 to start imagining this book as the first in the Race, Education, and Democracy series, I did not know in a conscious way that we were nearing the end of an era. I did not know that the next few months would be punctuated by the passing of a generation of Black women who had devoted their lives to the struggle for civil and human rights—women who had been empowered by their own education to work toward the elimination of racism and create a more inclusive vision of democracy—women like Constance Baker Motley, a distinguished civil rights lawyer who wrote the original complaint in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case; C. Delores Tucker, a tireless civil rights activist and founder of the National Congress of Black Women; Rosa Louise Parks, whose courageous refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus in 1955 changed the world; and Coretta Scott King, an icon of the civil rights movement who not only fought to preserve her husband’s legacy but became a tireless advocate for justice and human rights in her own right.
Indeed, it was just a few days after the passing of Mrs. King on January 30, 2006, that I gave my first Race, Education, and Democracy lecture at Simmons College, represented here as Chapter One, “The Resegregation of Our Schools and the Affirmation of Identity.” I was privileged to attend Mrs. King’s
funeral in Atlanta, and as I sat in the church listening to the dignitaries who had assembled to honor her memory, I thought about all the ways in which our society has changed since she and Martin Luther King Jr. left Boston in 1954 to begin their married lives in Montgomery, Alabama, and the bus boycott
launched by Rosa Parks’s actions in 1955. Their deaths, and those of the other women, represent the passing away of a generation raised under the iron rule of legalized segregation, a generation whose time and place must seem, to many young people, far removed from our current reality. Yet despite their
courageous leadership and sacrifice, and the courage and sacrifice of many others, more than fifty years later we find ourselvesstill confronting the legacy of race and racism in our society, particularly in our schools, a reality that undermines the quality of education for all students and represents an ongoing
threat to the fabric of our democracy.
Perhaps this should not surprise us. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My parents left the South in 1958 to escape segregation, but I, like many African Americans in the “reverse migration” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
have returned to the South of my birth, and now live in Atlanta, Georgia, where I serve as president of Spelman College, the oldest continuing historically Black college for women. When I think of my daily experience at the malls of Atlanta, and in the hotels downtown, and at cultural events, it is sometimes easy to forget that Black people did not always have such easy access to restaurants, libraries, restrooms, and water fountains. Young people may not know that familiar department stores were sites of local protest....
Copyright © 2008 by Beverly Daniel Tatum. Reprinted with permission of Beacon Press
Reviews
“Probing and ambitious”—Booklist
"Another thoughtful, personal and provocative book”—Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children’s Defense Fund
”[A] reality-based focus on how race affects us all….asking tough questions, and patiently, inclusively seeking answers”—Boston Globe
Author's Biography
Beverly Daniel Tatum is author of “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and “Assimilation Blues”. She is currently president of Spelman College in Atlanta, where she lives with her husband.