I felt the two readings this week deeply.  In particular, this line stood out to me in the second article: “King argued that Meier had “failed to comprehend the difference between integration as the demise of separate Black institutions, and desegregation, namely, the overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation defined by the exclusion of Black people “from access to power, wealth, education, status, and dignity” (pp. 19-20).  Integration has never served in any capacity as an “overthrow of the regime of racial subjugation,”  and her quoting of this statement called to mind for me two other pieces – Malcolm X’s 1963 speech “The Race Problem” and the Black Power manifesto written by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton.  In both cases, they write about the fact that both segregation and integration are controlled by whites and whiteness, and therefore neither gets to the heart of any fundamental shift to a violent or oppressive system.  

In the manifesto, Carmichael and Hamilton write: “‘integration’ as a goal…, is based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school.  This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically superior and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.  For this reason, ‘integration’ is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy’” (p. 22).  Similarly, Malcolm X told us: “This new type of black man, he doesn’t want integration; he wants separation….To him, segregation … means that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. A segregated community is a Negro community. But the white community, though it’s all white, is never called a segregated community. It’s a separate community. In the white community, the white man controls the economy, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything. That’s his community. But at the same time while the Negro lives in a separate community, it’s a segregated community. Which means it’s regulated from the outside by outsiders. The white man has all of the businesses in the Negro community. He runs the politics of the Negro community. He controls all the civic organizations in the Negro community. This is a segregated community.  We don’t go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.”

I am left thinking about Douglass-Hosford’s final call in her first article – “rather than continuing to produce and consume research that “discovers” the inequalities every person of color already knew existed, I wonder if we might instead envision a system of education where everyone is free.”  

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