The Miseducation of White America

Abstract

This paper was delivered at the University of Delaware during the first Louis L. Redding Civil Rights Symposium. The premise of this paper is that most public school curriculum remains a vestige of segregation. In order to desegregate public education, effective means must be developed to challenge the uniquely American racial hierarchy in which many white students view people of color as inferior. Desegregation should not simply be viewed as the process of placing people of different races in close proximity. Creating racially mixed schools as the primary remedy for desegregation has failed to promote racial equality as mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment because it has not challenged our ideas about race and racial identity. A democratic theory of education would encompass the idea of a desegregation process that includes transforming the curriculum in public institutions of education to divest students of wrongly held views about race.