Whenever I come back to visit Long Island, the intensity of suburban apartheid never fails to strike me. Back in 2002, a study cited in the NYTimes found Long Island to be the most racially segregated suburban area in the United States. Reflecting on the stories I’ve heard from my family members and many others who moved to LI during the 1970s, this information doesn’t surprise me. The whole purpose of migration from New York City to Long Island was to escape as white neighborhoods and schools were becoming ‘bad’ (read: black). While housing discrimination on the basis of race was outlawed in 1968, racist policies around mortgage lending and zoning helped to keep segregation entrenched.
I attended de facto segregated public schools from kindergarten through high school. I remember the first (and probably only) time in my life when someone called me racist. I was in third grade and noticed a black boy who I’d never seen before. As there were only about three black students in the school, I said something to the effect of “I didn’t know we had another black kid”. A sixth grader admonished me for saying something racist, though I made the statement out of curiosity rather than prejudice.
When it came to high school, segregation was an elephant in the room. At Kennedy High School, only 1% of students are black or Latino. Just one town over at Roosevelt High School, 99% of the students are black or Latino. While I was in high school, there was some major fear among Kennedy parents because Roosevelt’s school was failing. The state was threatening to shut it down and its students would be bussed to neighboring school districts. I remember hearing this discussed many times, including by teachers and school social workers. While some seemed to be well-meaning liberals exploring the idea of ‘tolerance’, no one dared to acknowledge the issue was about color. In the end, the state knew better than to unleash the wrath of the white mobs and decided to keep Roosevelt HS going.
A few months ago I realized that school demographic data is available online. I decided to take an amateur sociologist’s look at racial segregation at high schools in Nassau County. Here is what I came up with:
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The graph above shows the distribution of the county’s 18,000 black and Latino high school students between its 55 high schools. A perfectly even distribution (no segregation) would look like the blue line. The actual distribution is in red. As you can see, the distribution is highly unequal. 51% 0f the black and Latino students attend just 6 of the schools. There is also an abundance of white-dominated high schools like mine, though Kennedy is one of the most segregated. The whitest 30 schools cater to only 10% of the county’s black/Latino population. If you were betting on the nation’s most segregated school system, Nassau County would be a good place to put your money. Speaking of money, I was surprised to see that school funding did not significantly differ for black and Latino students as compared with whites. Presumably this is because of state equity funding, but I don’t know enough about state education policy to say so.
I often wonder about the effects of segregation on a young white person’s development. Though we learned about the Civil Rights Movement in many of our classes, our experiential education taught us about people of color only through their absence, through their exclusion from our schools. I took the Civil Rights curriculum very seriously. By high school, I took notice of the dissonance between the values I had learned in class and the kinds of people who were in (and not in) the classroom. This angered me, but also fueled my curiosity and made me want to learn about other people’s experiences.
But what about all of those white students who where were not curious?
All of this makes me think of the book I’m reading, Edward Soja’s Seeking Spatial Justice. In it, he describes the dialectic between society and geography. Yes, social values shape the landscape, as urban underinvestment, discrimination, and white flight created the particular pattens of Long Island’s development. But, in turn, Long Island’s ‘consequential geography’ (Soja’s term) also shaped my social experience, along with that of all of my peers. This spatial influence may have serious implications on how we interpret our society, approach democracy, or understand ourselves.