Reading, Writing, and Race: The Constitutionality of Educational Strategies Designed to Teach Racial Literacy
51 Pages Posted: 20 Oct 2007
Abstract
The Supreme Court's presumption that race-conscious educational decisions violate the Equal Protection Clause is based on its premise that white students and nonwhite students are alike in their educational opportunities. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. This article first shows that race-conscious educational decision-making should satisfy even the Supreme Court's current, strict equal protection scrutiny. The Supreme Court has recognized that states have a compelling interest in encouraging their educational institutions to provide educational benefits to their citizens. This article demonstrates that a school district's use of student assignment to produce a meaningful number of diverse students within a school, or classroom, is narrowly tailored to achieve the compelling governmental interest in teaching racial literacy. This article proceeds to demonstrate that the Court's current template for analyzing race-conscious decisions by public school officials should be modified. That template is the product of judicial precedent detached from any authentic understanding of the principle of equality undergirding the Equal Protection Clause. An analysis tethered to an authentic principle of equality would begin by scrutinizing whether the state educational administrators are reasonable in their assessment of the practical educational differences in persons that justify differential educational treatment. Where teaching racial literacy depends on understanding the existence of at least some racial differences, a program that is conscious of those differences in meeting its goal of teaching about them cannot be inconsistent with an authentic understanding of equality.
Keywords: race-conscious educational strategies, racial discrimination, equal protection, racial literacy
JEL Classification: I21, I28, J71
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation