According to a January report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated than they have been since the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, in 1968. In the 2006-07 school year, nearly 40% attended schools–many of them subpar “dropout factories”–where students of color made up 90% to 100% of the student body.

The report they are referring to is Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge , written by noted education and civil rights scholar Gary Orfield.

Not only do many public schools remain segregated by race, the report points out, but also by income as those same schools tend to be segregated by economic class.  Add to that the fact that those schools tend to be more likely to have unprepared teachers, college prep courses and enrichment activities and you have a whole class of students starting far behind.

If segregation is so obvious, why don’t we hear more about it?  Orfield provides this explanation of why whites think segregation is over:

Even as black and Latino students are becoming more isolated, the typical white child is in a school that is more diverse than the school white children attended a generation ago. This factor makes it especially hard for whites to understand the degree to which resegregation has taken place. In 1988, 53% of white students attended schools that were 90-100% white, but that number has slipped to 36% in the newest data. 94% of whites were in majority white schools then, but that has dropped to 87% in the most recent data. The share of whites attending multiracial schools has risen from 7% to 14%.

So, whites are becoming less segregated, but African Americans and Latinos are becoming more segregated. Overall, segregation is growing because non-whites are growing in proportion to whites.  But apparently that still isn’t much of a story.

On a related note, Forbes recently published a commentary on the case by Steven Donziger, the attorney representing the indigenous groups in the case. Almost more interesting than the column itself (which is obviously not un-biased) are the diatribes against it from Forbes readers.

Environmental risks here in the U.S. pale in comparison to what happens in the developing world, often the dumping ground for wealthy nations. The LA Times recently dedicates space for two longer-than-usual editorials on the suit of Ecuadorean indigenous groups against Texaco/Chevron. The discovery of oil in the Amazonian region of Ecuador in the 1960s created an economic boom, but also led to horrible contamination:

Today, a swath of the Ecuadorean Amazon the size of Rhode Island remains contaminated beyond imagining. At one site after another, oil hangs in the air, slides on the water’s surface and saturates the land. Pipelines and waste pits left behind years ago still drip and ooze. Advocates for the plaintiffs have called the former Texaco concession area the “Amazon Chernobyl.” Were it in the United States, it would easily qualify as a Superfund site. Neither side in the case disputes the devastation, only who should pay for it. Chevron says it is the state-owned oil company’s responsibility; the plaintiffs say it is Chevron’s.

Secoya Indians living in the village of San Pablo remember the day the river ran black. Old men tell of oil rushing down the waters, engulfing everything in its path and staining the banks. Then came the dead fish, floating on the surface. The people, however, continued to eat the fish, bathe in the water and use it for their cooking. They didn’t know any better.

The suit originated against Texaco but Chevron is now the defendant due to a merger.   Formerly in collusion with oil companies, the Ecuadorean government and courts now are more disposed to support the indigenous communities.  A verdict will come soon on this case, but the ultimate verdict on the links between a globalized economy, climate change and social justice is far from being settled.

Probably like most everyone, I personally know people who have lost their homes or are at serious risk of doing so. Besides the obvious financial drain, there are social and emotional costs of losing a home and having to move. The consequences are not just personal, of course, as declining property values mean reduced property tax revenue for local governments and the credit meltdown contributes to rising unemployment and overall insecurity in financial markets: a truly vicious cycle.

What surprised me most during the early stages of the meltdown was the, well, surprise with which policymakers, economic and financial “experts,” and the media reacted. It wasn’t as if plenty of researchers, analysts, activists and even some policymakers hadn’t been sounding alarm bells about the dangers of the housing boom. Even my 2004 dissertation highlighted the dangers of subprime lending for minority and low-income communities (further evidence that no one besides those who have to read those things…).

Now that things have (hopefully) stabilized somewhat, some are questioning whether the American-Dreamy promotion and prioritization of home ownership is in the best interest of society. U Penn Historian and Sociologist Thomas Sugrue had an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The New American Dream: Renting.” Sugrue traces how home ownership became so intertwined with American mythology:

The story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It’s not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It’s a different kind of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation.

We are a nation of homeowners and home-speculators because of Uncle Sam.

The mortgage interest tax deduction has helped subsidize increasing home ownership rates and suburbanization in the U.S., but also costs the federal government tens of billions of dollars in revenue. In a 2005 article in Shelterforce, Peter Dreier highlights the disparities in how homeowners and renters fare in help from the government:

Of the hundreds of tax breaks (what economists call “tax expenditures”) for corporations and individuals in the nation’s tax code, the largest are the subsidies for homeowners. The two major homeowner tax breaks cost the federal government almost $90 billion last year – $70.1 billion for the mortgage interest deduction and $19.3 billion for the property tax deduction – according to a report by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. That would be ok if most of it helped middle- and working-class people. But it doesn’t. Those with the highest incomes and the most expensive homes (including second homes) get the largest subsidy.

Most Americans think that federal housing assistance is a poor people’s program. In fact, less than one-fourth of all low-income Americans (those who have Section 8 rental vouchers or who live in government-assisted developments) receive federal housing subsidies. In contrast, almost two-thirds of wealthy Americans – many living in mansions – get housing aid from Washington.

Even the sacred cow of mortgage deduction has come under attack and been subjected to possible revision by the federal government. Even though, having bought a town home several years ago, I benefit greatly from this federal subsidy, I have to agree with Thomas Sugrue that “if there’s one lesson from the real-estate bust of the last few years, it might be time to downsize the dream, to make it a little more realistic.” Or, I might add, at least make access to it a little more equal.

With King shot just the day before in Memphis, Elliott encouraged her third-graders to discuss how something so horrible could happen.

“I finally said, ‘Do you kids have any idea how it feels to be something other than white in this country?’ “

The children shook their heads and said they wanted to learn, so Elliott set the rules. Blue-eyed children must use a cup to drink from the fountain. Blue-eyed children must leave late to lunch and to recess. Blue-eyed children were not to speak to brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children were troublemakers and slow learners.

Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.

Brown-eyed children “became domineering and arrogant and judgmental and cool,” she says. “And smart! Smart! All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading. I thought, ‘This is not possible, this is my imagination.’ And I watched bright, blue-eyed kids become stupid and frightened and frustrated and angry and resentful and distrustful. It was absolutely the strangest thing I’d ever experienced.”

As Elliot recounts in videos from the Frontline program, “A Class Divided,” she took this rather drastic approach because experience is more valuable than just talk:

I knew it was time to deal with this in a concrete way not just talk about it, because we had talked about racism since the first day of school.

I remember several years ago being asked by a friend who had been active in the civil rights movement and was African American why I, as the proverbial white male, was so concerned about inequality and discrimination. I had to think about it for a little bit. Certainly my most immediate influences of family and faith played important roles, but as I thought about it more, I realized that my education was formative in this regard. I was fortunate to attend public schools in the same state where Jane Elliot taught, with good teachers and a spirit of open-mindedness. I distinctly remember learning in school at an early age about the value of different cultures and race/ethnic groups. One of my earliest heroes I learned about in school, encouraged by my teachers, was Frederick Douglass. That reflection impressed on me the important role that education can play in learning not just about subjects, but also about life and dealing with with complex issues like racism and discrimination.

The UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) has been tracking the state of California’s middle and high schools for years, pointing to the overall appalling outcomes for students and “opportunity gap” between the primarily higher-income white schools and primarily lower-income African American and Latino schools.

IDEA’s latest California Educational Opportunity Report highlights the latest trends.

• California ranks near the bottom of states in terms of education in many categories: 48th in 4th grade reading level, 47th in 8th reading level, 46th for 4th grade mathematics, and 45th for 8th grade math level.
• For those students who started 9th grade in California in 2003, just 65% graduated four years later, just 25% graduated ready for college, and just 14% were in a Cal Sate University or University of California campus a year after graduation. The outcomes for African Americans and Latinos are even worse.
• California ranks among the bottom three states in numbers of students for every school counselor, in student-teacher ratios, and average high school class size.

Besides just the normal misery index of data, the report provides insights from focus groups with parents of public school students throughout the state. One mother shared:

“Years ago when I was in elementary school, California was one of the leading states in education. Now it’s at the bottom. I look at the opportunities that are there now versus what used to be and it’s just sad, it’s not there anymore.”

Just as sad is the fact that while these opportunities aren’t there for most people, they are for a select few. Another mother in one of the focus groups confessed:

“I agree with everybody as far as the gloom, but…I got lucky [with my children’s school]…It makes a big difference where the school is.”

It shouldn’t matter where the school is, or if you are rich or poor, white, African American, Latino, or Asian. These problems and trends, of course, aren’t unique to California: schools across our nation are failing our students.

As a parent of two children in a public elementary school – in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest district in the nation with a myriad of problems – I obviously care about the state of our education. But, I contend that even those who have kids in private schools or don’t have kids in school at all should be very concerned as well.

If this current economic crisis has taught us anything, it has shown how fragile our economic system is, a system that depends on innovation to compete in a global marketplace, but in an ethical, sustainable way. A big wave of highly-skilled baby boomers will be retiring over the next couple decades, and we need to replace them with a prepared workforce that can help our economy not implode like it has over the last few months. Businesses need skilled employees, we all need doctors, teachers and other public servants. Where are we going to find these workers? They’re in our schools today, so we better invest in them to increase equal opportunity to raise the level for all our students.

Postscript: In today’s LA Times, Michael Hiltzik contends that cuts to the university systems in California are undermining the state’s economic future.

• Nationally, the risk of contracting HIV or AIDS is 6.9 times higher for African-American and 3.1 times higher for Latino male adults and adolescents than for their white peers.
• Nationally, African-American men are 5.5 times more likely than white men to go to prison in their lifetime, and the odds of Latino men experiencing this outcome are 2.9 times higher than for white men.
• African-American Californians over the age of 25 are nearly twice as likely to be without a high school diploma as whites in that age category, while Latinos in California are almost seven times as likely as whites to be without a high school degree.
• Young African-American men (15 to 24 years) have a homicide death rate of more than 16 times that of young white men in California.
• African-American and Latino children are 3.4 times more likely than white children to live in poverty in California.

The reasons for these disparities are complex, and as the report highlights, there are macro, community, family and individual factors across health, physical, safety, social, economic, and educational domains that contribute to individual outcomes. No matter whether you see the causes of these disparities as mostly societal or structural, on the one hand, or from personal or family factors, on the other (or all of the above), the magnitude of these gaps is simply unacceptable. Thankfully, the report offers up some examples of proven approaches and programs at various levels that can help reduce these disparities.

More precisely, the most recent cover story of The Atlantic asks the provocative question of whether we are witnessing “The End of White America?” It is a timely question and something worth reflecting on. The thrust of this article is that culturally, “whiteness” (be it defined by the privileged class of The Great Gatsby or the rural working class of NASCAR) has lost out to a multiculturalism as expressed through hip-hop music, and that demographically, the U.S. is headed toward a future not dominated by whites.

So, what exactly do we mean by “white” in this context? The most obvious component is skin color, and those of us with exclusively, or mostly, European ancestry – and in my case pretty much limited to the British Isles as far as we know – are typically referred to as white today. This ignores, of course, the fact that at different parts of the history of our country, Jews, Italians and even the Irish were not considered white, although they are today. Generally, whiteness has signified privilege, at least socially if not economically (e.g. even poor whites enjoyed the right to vote or ride in the front of the bus at the expense of African Americans or other groups). As Sociologists tell us, race is socially constructed, meaning that its definitions change and adapt over time, something that is critical to remember in any discussion about race.

As to The Atlantic article’s second point that by sheer demographics, we are becoming less white, that is certainly true, but we still don’t know how this will change how we view race in the future. The dominant black-white paradigm is still very real because of the sad history of slavery and discrimination in our country, but this paradigm has been disrupted over recent decades by the rapid increase in the numbers of Latinos and Asians across the country. (By the way, when I use “race” here I include “ethnicity” which is what the U.S. Census Bureau uses for Hispanic or Latino groups. If you’re interested in more info, go here). In Los Angeles, for example, Latinos represent about half of the population, while whites are less than a third, while Asian Pacific Islanders are about 13% and African Americans about 9%. Whites are a majority in most of the country today, but demographic projections from the Census Bureau indicate that no group will be the majority by 2042.

Now that we’ve elected an African American President, should any of these distinctions matter? Well, no and yes. On the one hand, it would certainly be nice to realize Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a society where his children will “not be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” and Obama’s election is hopefully a step in that direction. However, we clearly have a long way to go. When we analyze almost any socioeconomic condition by race, whites clearly tend to enjoy much better conditions than other racial groups. (Asians are in many cases on par with, or even, surpass whites, though that sometimes masks low socioeconomic conditions of some southeast Asian groups). Racial differences are very real and will not disappear over night, and those of us from the privileged group need to acknowledge that fact and work to rectify it.

Clearly, poverty and inequality don’t discriminate and can afflict anyone from any racial group. Our conceptions of race and identity are shifting and will continue to do so as our population becomes even more diverse and bi- or multi-racial. So, are we witnessing the end of White America? Perhaps demographically and even culturally, but unless we create a society truly based on equality we risk replacing “whiteness” with just another construct of privilege, with stark divisions between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”