Assimilation or Marginality? Some School Integration Effects Reconsidered

Abstract

This research asks whether school integration increases the similarity of black adolescent males and their white counterparts in performance and perspective. Integration brings black children into fuller sustained contact with whites and thereby gives them new points of reference for behavior and self-evaluation. Hypothetically, because of past and present social inequities, this experience could be a difficult one for blacks, leading to negative self-judgments, frustration, and even rebellion. The assumption that undergirds social policy, however, is that integration has on balance a positive impact on blacks, resulting in their greater assimilation into the mainstream of American life. The evidence to date generally-if not decisively-supports the assimilation view. Compared to those in segregated schools, integrated blacks receive higher grades and have higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance, and occupational achievement. With respect to self-evaluation, their sense of efficacy or destiny control tends to be higher, while their self-esteem appears to be lower. Both of these trends, despite their different directions, are compatible with an assimilation interpretation, which holds that integration brings more optimism about future life chances but also greater realism in current self-judgments. The present research uses interview data gathered in one of the major sociological studies of white and black children in the 1960s. While these data are perhaps by some standards becoming old, they are still heavily cited, making new lines of analysis and interpretation of current interest. In this case, we have tried to examine more directly than in the past the appropriateness of the prevailing assimilationist interpretation of integration effects. As assimilation implies that integrated blacks are not only different from segregated blacks-the comparison usually reportedbut more like whites, a threefold comparison is sustained throughout our