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Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
A Different Shade of Segregation: A Puerto Rican Educator Considers the Legacy of Brown
By Ricardo Dobles
Ricardo Dobles is a former Senior Associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author's biography
The Brown-era civil rights struggle was fueled by relations between Black and White Americans. Since then, immigration has made our nation's ethnic and racial mix more complex. For Latino students twenty years ago, when the author attended school, and today, in a largely Latino city in Massachusetts, Brown has limited relevance. Most young Latinos remain in separate and unequal schools.
The first time I seriously considered the significance of Brown v. Board of Education was as a first-year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am sure that somewhere in my previous academic experiences I had come across this landmark civil rights case. However, I could not for the life of me remember it. As a result, every time my professors referred to Brown (always just “Brown” and always with the assumption that no further explanation was needed), I felt the pangs of insecurity that come with being conscious of one's ignorance.
Afraid that I was the only person in the room not entirely familiar with Brown v. Board of Education, I of course never asked for further explanation of the legal decision. Instead, I sought out the most remote corner of the library and read about preceding court cases, like Plessy v. Ferguson, and, finally, Brown itself.
My immediate reaction to this historic Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unlawful was that it made perfect sense that I was not familiar with the decision; it seemed to have no relevance or resemblance to my own educational experience. I understood why I had relegated this extraordinarily significant civil rights case to the furthest recesses of my educational memory. Why would I be expected to know the history of this case when I was clearly neither the intended nor indirect beneficiary? This decision was about the legal separation of Black and White students. Puerto Rican students, in particular, and Latinos, in general, were certainly not a part of the racial equation in 1954.
My second thought upon learning about Brown was: If that ruling ended segregation, it was news to me. As an elementary and middle school student in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1970s, I went to school in a very diverse district — District 14 — which included Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, Poles, and Hasidic Jews. Yet, when I went to school every day at P.S. 224 and, later, at I.S. 71, my classmates were almost all Puerto Rican. A few blocks away, I.S. 318 housed predominantly African American students. The Italians and Poles, I assume, went to their own schools, although I cannot say where with any certainty, because I barely had any contact with them. Hasidic students, with whom we shared a city block, were the only other ethnic group I saw, but our education was segregated; in the morning, we all walked to school “together,” then they went into their school building and we into ours.
For me, then, segregation was a way of life, twenty years after Brown. No wonder I knew so little about the decision. And my experience is not unique. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, the typical Latino student attends a school in which more than half of the students are Latino and only a fourth are white; and Latinos are most segregated in the Northeast (Orfield & Lee 2004). Clearly, the legacy of Brown for the Latino community is complicated.
Archives
Beyond Brown v. Board
VUE Number 4, Summer 2004
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
A Different Shade of Segregation: A Puerto Rican Educator Considers the Legacy of Brown
By Ricardo Dobles
Ricardo Dobles is a former Senior Associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
> Author's biography
The Brown-era civil rights struggle was fueled by relations between Black and White Americans. Since then, immigration has made our nation's ethnic and racial mix more complex. For Latino students twenty years ago, when the author attended school, and today, in a largely Latino city in Massachusetts, Brown has limited relevance. Most young Latinos remain in separate and unequal schools.
The first time I seriously considered the significance of Brown v. Board of Education was as a first-year doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I am sure that somewhere in my previous academic experiences I had come across this landmark civil rights case. However, I could not for the life of me remember it. As a result, every time my professors referred to Brown (always just “Brown” and always with the assumption that no further explanation was needed), I felt the pangs of insecurity that come with being conscious of one's ignorance.
Afraid that I was the only person in the room not entirely familiar with Brown v. Board of Education, I of course never asked for further explanation of the legal decision. Instead, I sought out the most remote corner of the library and read about preceding court cases, like Plessy v. Ferguson, and, finally, Brown itself.
My immediate reaction to this historic Supreme Court case that declared segregation in schools unlawful was that it made perfect sense that I was not familiar with the decision; it seemed to have no relevance or resemblance to my own educational experience. I understood why I had relegated this extraordinarily significant civil rights case to the furthest recesses of my educational memory. Why would I be expected to know the history of this case when I was clearly neither the intended nor indirect beneficiary? This decision was about the legal separation of Black and White students. Puerto Rican students, in particular, and Latinos, in general, were certainly not a part of the racial equation in 1954.
My second thought upon learning about Brown was: If that ruling ended segregation, it was news to me. As an elementary and middle school student in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1970s, I went to school in a very diverse district — District 14 — which included Puerto Ricans, African Americans, Italians, Poles, and Hasidic Jews. Yet, when I went to school every day at P.S. 224 and, later, at I.S. 71, my classmates were almost all Puerto Rican. A few blocks away, I.S. 318 housed predominantly African American students. The Italians and Poles, I assume, went to their own schools, although I cannot say where with any certainty, because I barely had any contact with them. Hasidic students, with whom we shared a city block, were the only other ethnic group I saw, but our education was segregated; in the morning, we all walked to school “together,” then they went into their school building and we into ours.
For me, then, segregation was a way of life, twenty years after Brown. No wonder I knew so little about the decision. And my experience is not unique. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, the typical Latino student attends a school in which more than half of the students are Latino and only a fourth are white; and Latinos are most segregated in the Northeast (Orfield & Lee 2004). Clearly, the legacy of Brown for the Latino community is complicated.
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