According to Wikipedia, today is the 70th anniversary of the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education.
This case was to change America by ending racial segregation. However, it is now 70 years later and America is more segregated than ever.
Brown v. Board of Education, 70 years on, is both revered and unfulfilled (msn.com)
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As part of a discussion that certain members of my Amherst Class of 1975 would like to partake in, it might be beneficial for everyone to ask the question "After 70 Years of Brown v. Board of Education, Why Haven't We Made More Progress?"
As fate would have it, I am still going through the Year of 1930. One of the individuals who was born in 1930 happens to be Derrick Bell Derrick Bell was a brilliant lawyer who, for a time, was an ardent believer in pursuing justice for aggrieved minorities through the justice system. However, over time, he came to realize that his efforts were not securing the change that needed to be achieved. in a groundbreaking law review article entitled "Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma", Professor Bell examined his concerns. And this law review article became one the seminal scholarly foundations for what became a new interdisciplinary academic field known as critical race theory.
Today critical race theory is vilified by so many throughout the land. But, if we want to more clearly understand why we haven't made more progress some 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, well we should perhaps pay attention to what Derrick Bell says. This is how Wikipedia describes it:
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Interest convergence is a concept introduced by Derrick Bell in his 1980 Harvard Law Review article, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma". In this article, Bell described how he re-assessed the impact of the hundreds of NAACP LDF de-segregation cases he won from 1960 to 1966, and how he began to believe that in spite of his sincerity at the time, anti-discrimination law had not resulted in improving Black children's access to quality education. He listed and described how Supreme Court cases had gutted civil rights legislation, which had resulted in African-American students continuing to attend all-black schools that lacked adequate funding and resources. In examining these Supreme Court cases, Bell concluded that the only civil-rights legislation that was passed coincided with the self-interest of white people, which Bell termed interest convergence.[70][71]
One of the best-known examples of interest convergence is the way in which American geopolitics during the Cold War in the aftermath of World War II was a critical factor in the passage of civil rights legislation by both Republicans and Democrats. Bell described this in numerous articles, including the aforementioned, and it was supported by the research and publications of legal scholar Mary L. Dudziak. In her journal articles and her 2000 book Cold War Civil Rights—based on newly released documents—Dudziak provided detailed evidence that it was in the interest of the United States to quell the negative international press about treatment of African-Americans when the majority of the populations of newly decolonized countries which the US was trying to attract to Western-style democracy, were not white. The US sought to promote liberal values throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America to prevent the Soviet Union from spreading communism.[72] Dudziak described how the international press widely circulated stories of segregation and violence against African-Americans.
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The answer to the question of "Why Haven't We Made More Progress?" just may be that most Americans do not believe that it is in their interest to do so. The interests have simply "diverged".
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
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