Systemic Oppression and Education in African-American Community

1100 Words3 Pages

The foundation of a community is built upon its various social institutions: educational, economic, and governmental; as a result, the trajectory of one’s familial life is predicated on the outcomes that these institutions produce. When inequality becomes the crux upon which these systems are built, the ostensible result is widespread oppression. It has long been understood that providing an equitable, high quality education is a critical component of any given society’s socio-economic success, thus a society’s failure to properly educate its citizenry represents a significant social problem. The African-American community is one such example of persons who have long fought against the systems of oppression that have denied them access to …show more content…

Efforts toward ethnic integration on the macro and micro levels of American society were considered important, not only to the Black American family, but to the overall social, political and economic success of the nation. The Supreme Court of the United States paved the way for greater diversity in schools by imposing enforceable, busing programs in an effort to desegregate schools, and also by using so-called “affirmative action” programs to diversify schools with more women and ethnic minorities. Jeremy Fiel describes the incidence of resegregation in schools as, “a mode of exclusion that emerges from group-based competition for resources and promotes educational stratification” (Fiel 2013). At the macro level, laws were instituted to provide equal access to groups that were institutionally oppressed. The consensus was that desegregation of the public schools and workforce would provide meaningful socio-economic opportunities. The previous efforts to integrate, educate and prosper these stratified groups have been diluted by recent attempts of the status quo to rescind the institutional protections afforded to these groups. As a result of these counterproductive efforts, “‘Black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated today than at any time’ since data became available in 1970, Richard Rothstein, a research …show more content…

Nancy Leong’s scholarly article Racial Capitalism extols policy measures that broaden institutional inclusivity in the United States, she asserts “diversity is a necessary prerequisite to improving racial relations in America. The efforts of colleges and universities, employers, and other institutions to promote racial diversity should be celebrated, not disparaged” (Leong 1). Macro and micro level attitudes toward institutionally imposed diversity efforts, such as affirmative action, have evolved as more Americans view the nation as a “post-racial society”. These pervasive, modern attitudes toward race created the demand for institutional policies to override affirmative action in schools. Resegregation in schools is the symptom, but diversity-based policies such as affirmative action can empower American society socially as it also rebuilds the United States economically. The dissolution of these integrative measures represents the ongoing trends of willful ignorance by the status quo toward the real needs of its disadvantaged minorities, and a blatant disregard for the immense challenges these groups have yet to overcome. Scott Jasick notes that the support for the elimination of affirmative action policies is frequently linked to self-interest,

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