Educational Research and Desegregation: Significance for the Black Community

Abstract

When Kenya gained its independence, the white minority there feared reprisals and thought they would be driven from their homelands by the Mau Mau. But that did not happen. When a reporter asked one white affluent Kenyan why, the Kenyan said, We gave them the parliament and we kept the banks. For African-Americans in the diaspora, the colonial experience has often been used as an analytical framework for the interpretation of our condition. James Turner explains it this way: Those who apply the colonial analogy to the Black American ghetto define colonialism in terms of the domination of one group of people by another for the latter's material benefit. Basically, the colonial analogy views the Black community as underdeveloped areas whose economics, politics, and social institutions are controlled externally by a different racial/cultural group which dominates the political economy of the society.' Just as the white Kenyans retained control of the banking institutions to maintain their power to confine and define, so white America retained control of the definition of integration in the struggle for school desegregation. They gave us busing and they took the jobs. As Donald H. Smith said at the Regional Conference of the National Alliance of Black School Educators held in Chicago on March 12, 1977: ... A door that was opened briefly by the tumultuous sixties is now closing rapidly. Primarily white universities throughout the country are returning to policies of traditional admissions standards and no-need scholarships. Black faculties who were recruited during the guilt-ridden sixties are now being dismissed in large numbers. The black universities are in danger of becoming extinct as one by one in the name of integration they lose their identities. Everett Abney2 observed a similar condition in his survey of