Integration or Separation?: A Strategy for Racial Equality

by Roy L. Brooks

Integrated in principle, segregated in is this the legacy of fifty years of "progress" in American racial policy? Is there hope for much better? Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law and a writer on matters of race and civil rights, says with frank clarity what few will admit--integration hasn't worked and possibly never will. Equally, he casts doubt on the solution that many African-Americans and mainstream whites have total separation of the races. This book presents Brooks's strategy for a middle way between the increasingly unworkable extremes of integration and separation.

Limited separation, the approach Brooks proposes, shifts the focus of civil rights policy from the group to the individual. Defined as cultural and economic integration within African-American society, this policy would promote separate schooling, housing, and business enterprises where needed to bolster the self-sufficiency of the community, without trammeling the racial interests of individuals inside or outside of the group, and without endangering the idea of a shared Americanness. But all the while Brooks envisions African-American public schools, businesses, and communities redesigned to serve the enlightened self-interest of the individual. Unwilling to give up entirely on racial integration, he argues that limited separation may indeed lead to improved race relations and, ultimately, to healthy integration.

This book appears at a crucial time, as Republicans dismantle past civil rights policies and Democrats search for new ones. With its alternative strategy and useful policy ideas for bringing individual African-Americans into mainstream society as first-class citizens, Integration or Separation? should influence debate and policymaking across the spectra of race, class, and political persuasion.

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Lawrence Grandpre · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author tries to walk a middle road between integration and separation and ends up largely going nowhere. This is good book because it reflects the anxieties many in the black middle/upper class feel, a desire to affirm America and civil right history while clearly recognizing that for the masses of black people integration has not worked as a liberation strategy.

This text goes further than many text today in being critical of liberal integrationism and the non profit industrial complex pushing things like education reform and defending black independent schools, but goes harder in attacking and using limited historical context to argue all efforts at Black separation have been self evident failure. Left out of this text are the maroon communities of America, the Caribbean, and South America and Black community control economic policies. While trying to respond to Black conservative attacks on Affirmative Action and "black houses" at schools the author can not hide his sense that he finds the simplistic racial cheerleading done by race conscious undergraduates distasteful (my god I hope this guy isn't on twitter today) and pushes for "whole student" admission policies that focus more on class and life experience than race alone. This, in addition to a small mention of unions helping white ethics, is the only real discussion about class in this text, as the authors analysis of class is limited to delineating the black bougiouse from the black underclass to respond to black conservative attacks that black culture is "pathological". This lack of class analysis really hurts his consistent analogizing of Black bussiness to white/Jewish/Asian ethnic enclaves as a liberation strategy for Blacks while ignoring the clear class advantages these whites had, both in terms of American historically access to government policy and the unique make up of who comes to America of these ethnic groups (typically more well off and entrepreneurship minded).

This leads to author to reject large scale redistributive policy in favor of a limited separation policy of black bussiness, black schools, cultural integration, and an interesting black ethnic voting strategy based upon proportional voting rather than racial gerrymandering. All of this he assumes would pass constitutional muster, a reality I think is funny given what we see in today's supreme court generally seeing racial separation by blacks as suspect while affirming the rights of whites to do whatever they want.

Chalk this book up to one of many post million man march books which saw the rise of Farrakhan as a shot by the Black lumpen at the Black middle class and the integration and affirmative action they (alone) benefited from. Credit to him by taking the challenge head on. Now most people just use intellectual obfuscation to essentially ignore Black nationalism and pan Africanism. This text is a good look at what Black liberals really think about a lot of these issues. Besides his issues with Affirmative Action, and willingness to criticize educational integration and "fair funding", I think this text reflects what many in the Black bourgeoisie (and the black middle and working class) think and feel about these issues. I also think it's a great example about how this bipolar politics around nationalism and integration, when it expresses itself, is politically incoherent. There is complexity and nuance in terms of how the relate to these question, but almost no one wants to actually examine these concepts in details. This text, like many, knows where it wants to go and build a justification around why their vision of where to stand on the integration/nationalism conversation is "the only logical place to be". It is stunning how much further towards the nationalism side this text is compared to modern texts which refuse to take the concept seriously. However, I don't blame today generation of Black Lives matter style political folks trying to cut the baby in half on these issues for not addressing these issues directly, they know they really don't want to get into a debate on these issues.