Brown vs. Defacto Segregation
I have to give Mr. Guillermo props for honesty and principles.
On Brown And Our Taste For Segregation
Emil Guillermo, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
©2004 SF Gate
If only Brown vs. Board of Education had been decided in an era of real diversity, instead of during a time when America was black and white.
Then, maybe, I'd have no conflicts with the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the notion of "separate but equal" in the public schools.
But, as I consider the impacts of Brown, I wonder whether my efforts to integrate America put me on the side of the segregationists.
Let me clarify: I'm a believer in integration. But there was only one way for me, an Asian American of Filipino descent, to really guarantee it in my lifetime.
I married a white woman.
…White flight to the suburbs is perhaps the most notorious of all the reactions toward Brown. But what you don't often hear about is Asian flight as well.
Check the census figures, and Asian Americans are always the next-largest group in more affluent communities, sometimes breaching the 10 percent barrier. In Palo Alto, Asian Americans constitute more than 17 percent of the population, versus whites, at 75.8 percent.
But the general pattern is for whites to dominate a given town's population with 80-90 percent of the population, with Asian Americans being the only people of color to significantly show up on the census radar.
Take former President Clinton's home of Chappaqua, N.Y., a nice Westchester County suburb of New York. Chappaqua is 91.5 percent white. The second-most-populous group is Asian Americans, at 5.6 percent. Blacks? They're at 0.9 percent. All 89 of them.
No wonder Clinton put his office in Harlem. He had to in order to feel like an egalitarian.
I'm dealing with census numbers, but I have no doubt the ethnicity statistics for public schools reflect the community demographics in the aforementioned cities.
Add it all together, and you have the segregation Brown hasn't been able to fend off -- the natural "economic" segregation of people and the flight to a decent education.
In a black-and-white context, where does it put Asian Americans? As the new whites? Yet ask Asian Americans in Orinda, and they'll say they aren't segregationists, or separatists. I know I wasn't. We were the "integration" factor.
But can you call entering a community that is 80 percent white real integration?
