Chapter 3: Ethnography as a Policy Tool: The Case of School Desegregation and Resegregation

In 2006, I participated in the drafting of an amicus brief in support of the Jefferson County, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, public school systems (Brief of the Council, 2006). The Parents Involved (U.S. Supreme Court, 2007) case, as it had come to be called by the time it reached the United States Supreme Court was both frustrating and ironic.¹ Presented with the opportunity to help put together the social science research section of the brief, I was both excited to be a part of the effort and resentful that, in 2006, there was still a need to demonstrate that White children were not harmed by sitting in classrooms with Black children, or that Black children, particularly those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, generally benefited from racially integrated schooling experiences. In a matter of days during meetings with the legal, legislative, and research teams, an irritating incongruity permeated the space. Jefferson County was no longer under a court order to desegregate. It had been relieved from its court order in 2000. This Kentucky county had voluntarily integrated its school system. Its citizens believed that integration was important enough to put a system in place that would preserve it, and the Supreme Court was about to decide whether that was legal. I was born in 1973 and attended de facto segregated schools in Memphis, Tennessee, so learning that Whites in a previously segregated Southern community had been so committed to integration was a tremendous lesson for me, but why was that lesson not a more significant part of the discussion? Where were the voices of individuals who voluntarily desegregated? They had already been part of the policymaking processes in Jefferson County and Seattle, but their voices were mute beyond their own communities.