Schooling as a White Good

Abstract

Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to place, the knowledge that schools impart, and the hobbling of brown and Black children. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.

—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time ¹

Introduction

They came from “all over the state and other states.” It was the first day of school, fall of 1957, and a white mob assembled outside Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas to protest the arrival of nine Black teenagers to the formerly all-white school. Attracting national attention, the state's governor sent the National Guard to “maintain or restore peace and good order” by assisting the mob, not the children.²

We are familiar with what happened next (see Figure 1). President Eisenhower asked the governor to let the children in; instead, the governor withdrew state troops. Little Rock police could not adequately control the mob, and Eisenhower sent in federal troops, who spent the school year guarding the kids. The following year the Arkansas governor closed all Little Rock high schools. More broadly, state governments across the South engaged in a violent and cynical game of legal hide-and-seek to keep Black children from attending white schools.³ We still live in its aftermath.

Figure 1. Black Student Elizabeth Eckford is jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, Sept. 4, 1957. Distributed by the Associated Press. Photographer Will Counts, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, *https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Eckford.jpg.

How do we explain what is happening in this moment?

A progressive view, still popular among educational historians, suggests that images like this are exceptional. The public good has been the core goal of public schooling and, reciprocally, public schooling has been a foundational good for the United States. Schooling was imperfect, of course, and excluded particular groups, but things are getting better. In that sense, the mob is historically exceptional or regionally idiosyncratic. The kids are marching Arkansas into a better future, to the tune of the Fourteenth Amendment.

A second, less common but influential account of schooling frames it in economic terms: schools allocate public and private goods, generate society-wide human capital, and individual social mobility. The economic framing of schooling also sidelines racism, however. The classical economic way of seeing schooling might partially explain why those nine children (and their parents) were putting themselves in harm's way (although they had other motivations too), but I don't see how the economic framing accounts for the mob, who are not there for their individual private interests or to support the economic development of Arkansas.

A third accounting, rooted in Black American, Latinx, Native, and other subaltern histories, as well as critical race theories, decenters white people as the protagonists of educational experience. This family of scholarship frames schools as institutions promoting white racial interests against which non-whites resist strategically and contingently. Little Rock is unexceptional in this accounting, even if its details might play out uniquely. This view is incompatible with the first two, and to my mind, much more persuasive.

But it still leaves me wondering about the good. Schools can be places of joy, learning, and human flourishing. There's a long-running and broad consensus among political theorists that schools are essential to healthy democracies. How can so many people believe that schooling is a good, when it seems to do so much harm? If Little Rock is unexceptional, how can we explain the goals and functions of schooling in the United States that account for the mob, the kids, the various legal authorities, and the violence all around?

In this talk I offer a new way of framing the goals and functions of schooling in the United States. Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Instead, I will argue that since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

Calling schooling a white good is a small—and I hope, logical—step from the remarkable work that many historians, legal scholars, social scientists, and others have done in the last thirty years excavating and explaining the way in which schooling in the United States is a fundamentally racial project. It also accounts for and corrects racially naive political and economic framings that have been such powerful drivers of school policy. Finally, calling schooling a white good helps explain how it can be something that seems to be good for everyone while also doing the harm of recreating racial inequality.

The paper has five parts. Part 1 describes the historical problems with calling schooling a public good, either in a political or economic sense. Part 2 offers an alternative framework focused on white goods. Part 3 looks at some of the primary mechanisms by which schooling has secured white advantage over time, and how people without access to whiteness have resisted these mechanisms and insisted on schooling being a public good. Part 4 examines the role of violence in protecting schooling as a white good. I will then conclude with some remarks on what the white goods framework might mean for telling the history of education in the United States.

I. The Mythical Origins of the Public Goods Talk

Scholars talk about schooling and the public good in two ways. The first is to engage the idea of “the public good.” It is a conversation as old as philosophy. The second is the idea of a public good, in an economic sense, and is of recent vintage. Both are problematic for describing the history of schooling in the United States.

The anachronism of “the public good” is straightforward enough. The word public comes directly from the Latin publicus, meaning “in relation to the people at large and/or the government.” That connotation endured through the early colonial period. Importantly, however, both then and now the word is available to both anti-democratic and liberal democratic visions of society. Whether in the slave republic of Rome or the slave colony of Virginia, “the public” meant both the existing social arrangement and all the people in it. Throughout the British Atlantic, colonial governments explicitly and implicitly framed Native and Black people as civic outsiders—objects of the law but not participants in its processes or protections.⁴ The enslavement and/or subordination of some groups of people were the goals of government for the promotion of the public good.

After the revolution, when white Americans began systematically organizing state services like safety, education, health, and legal due process, one of the biggest questions in American politics was whether and how to use government to create a society that accorded people different levels of status: Who enjoyed the protection of the law? Who could vote, own property or be someone else's property? Who could participate in schooling? A look at state constitutions reveals that when most authorities in the antebellum period said “the public good” they referred to social stability and progress, but not the radical notion that all people should enjoy legal privileges, including formal education. Leon Litwack estimates that in 1840, 93 percent of all free Black people in the North lived in states that excluded them from voting, and in many states, Black people had to post security bonds in order to settle in their communities.⁵ The so-called goal of an educated citizenry did not apply to “the public,” in the sense we use the word today, but to whites.⁶ American freedom and unfreedom were mutually reinforcing. Race was the mechanism.⁷ It can be misleading when historians today identify points in the past when writers intoned words like “the common good” or “the public good” as a way to suggest that schooling was for everyone's equal benefit. It wasn't.⁸

In economics, it was Paul Samuelson's 1954 article “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure” that launched the modern career of policy talk about education as “a public good.”⁹ A public good, he argued, is something useful that anyone can consume (that is to say, a public good is non-exclusive). Moreover, a good is public if one person's consumption or benefit does not limit other people's consumption or benefit (that is to say, a public good is non-rivalrous).¹⁰ Private goods are the polar opposite of public goods, according to the original definition: their consumption is exclusive and individualistic.

The argument was scandalously naive in its bipolar account of private individuals and public society. “I assume no mystical collective mind that enjoys collective consumption goods,” Samuelson wrote. “Instead I assume each individual has a set of ordinal preferences with respect to his consumption of all goods (collective as well as private).”¹¹ Of course, whiteness was, and is, just such a “collective mind,” influenced by the collective utility of white goods to any white person. Whiteness ran through local, state, and federal law, social custom, residential and employment patterns, so-called public and so-called private activity alike at the very time that Samuelson wrote those words.¹² Resistance to whiteness and the collective identities formed by minoritized people were also neither public nor private. The mysticism was in Samuelson's theory.

Contemporary scholars had offered more realistic appraisals. W. E. B. Du Bois, of course, had identified the “wages of whiteness” in Black Reconstruction (1935).¹³ And respected economist Gunnar Myrdal criticized his field in his blockbuster study, An American Dilemma (1944), arguing that “the good” is a moral problem and not one of mere “valuation” along hedonistic or utilitarian lines.¹⁴ He agreed with Du Bois that racism was foundational to American society, and that white Americans as a group accrued many economic advantages through their racist laws and actions.¹⁵

Undaunted, however, Samuelson and his intellectual heirs (and foes) continued to ignore or sideline race in their pursuit of ideal (normalized white) theories of human activity, as did many scholars across the social sciences.¹⁶ For example, Nobel Laureate Gary Becker argued in The Economics of Discrimination (1957) that racial discrimination was a matter of costly, individual taste. It was the work of record on the subject for nearly forty years. Economists developed racially naïve theories of educational mobility (Turner, 1960), of residential choice (Tiebout, 1956), and of government investment in human capital (Shultz, 1961; Becker, 1964) that ignored the structured white advantage in schools; the legal, officially tolerated, and highly violent systems of residential segregation that shaped where people live and situate schools; and the deliberate, centuries-old, and highly profitable white investment in deskilling Black, brown, and Native children for maximal profitability and political domination.¹⁷

During the 1970s, racially naive economic frameworks that were developed in the 1950s and 1960s entered the mainstream of public policy. As they entered the mainstream of educational policy specifically, left- as well as right-leaning educational researchers began speaking of the politics and function of schooling through classical economic theories of production and consumption, including efficiency, markets, and public goods/private goods.¹⁸ According to this “goods” model, public schooling in the United States served two competing kinds of goals: allocating public goods such as political socialization and human capital development, both of which benefited society as a whole, and the allocation of the private good of mobility—individual competitive advantage in a capitalist economy achieved primarily through credentialing.¹⁹ The role of whiteness in these accounts was secondary and exceptional. Moreover, this same public goods/private goods framing soon captured the heart of federal and state school policy and jurisprudence as well, driving efforts toward privatization and toward “school choice” policy solutions such as vouchers for private schools or quasi-private “charter schools,” tuition tax credits, and other approaches.²⁰

Those scholars who took up the “public goods” analysis of American education on the left were part of a broad movement in legal studies, policy, and history that, at the time, sought to correct the then-pervasive laissez-faire account of nineteenth-century America that relied on a series of myths—individualism, exceptionalism, statelessness, and individual rights.²¹ Educational historians seeking to counter this exaggerated laissez-faire account of nineteenth-century America have, since then, understandably sought to use the public goods/private goods framework in a kind of rhetorical jujitsu against the right-wing romance with a mythical American past.²² The goal is laudable. The problem, however, is that the terms of the debate are, themselves, part of the problem—a classic case of trying to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.²³ The public good, and public goods, were not what they appeared to be.

Despite its success in the policy realm, cracks began to appear in the grand edifice of racially naive economic thinking in the 1990s as well, thanks to the work of critical race scholars. Several in particular have made significant contributions to our understandings of how race functions in schooling, and are important antecedents to a theory of schooling as a white good. Cheryl Harris has argued that whiteness is a form of property, a status identity of legal privileges that coevolved with property law to the point of convergence.²⁴ George Lipsitz and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, among others, have shown that racism is structural, not idiosyncratic and individual.²⁵ Charles Tilly developed a theory of “opportunity hoarding” to understand how white people leverage their networks to acquire exclusive access to seemingly open resources, work that was expanded in educational history by John Rury, and in educational sociology by John Diamond and Amanda Lewis.²⁶ And Victor Ray has built on structural race theories to develop a theory of racialized organizations, arguing that race is central to the history, structure, and functioning of organizations, including schools.²⁷

The most influential work toward a theory of white goods comes from scholars in law and economics, including Robert Cooter and Daria Roithmayr.²⁸ Robert Cooter's 1994 law review essay, “Market Affirmative Action,” marked the first non-racially naive account of racism in economic terms: whiteness functions like a cartel, he argued. Cartel economics and anti-trust law offered models for meliorating the harms of white supremacy. Picking up that clew, in 2014 Roithmayr argued that the history of public policy across the twentieth century, including the history of schooling in particular, was shaped by white cartel behavior to such a degree that white advantage may now be “locked in” by self-perpetuating structures and institutions even if, on paper, white cartel behavior is now illegal.²⁹ Although Roithmayr does not engage the goods framework specifically, her pathbreaking integration of economic thinking into a critical race analysis has paved the way.

II. Schooling as a White Good

A theory of schooling as a white good requires brief definitions of “white” and “good.” Whiteness was, until quite recently, a formal legal category in American law and a foundational one in custom, from the local level to the state and federal.³⁰ It described a group of people who enjoyed special group rights and privileges in relation to other “non-white” groups—in employment, residence, marriage and family, political participation, legal protection, and access to organizations and institutions, whether public or private. Even today, surface changes in the law have not changed the salience of whiteness in implicit and explicit behavior, belief, and cultural practices;³¹ nor has the law corrected the many social structures erected or tolerated by previous laws that continue to harm non-white people and provide privilege to white people.³² Historically, white goods have shifted from explicit white domination and privilege by law and custom to embedded white categorical advantages by virtue of the cultural and structural “lock in” that Roithmayr describes.

As a social construct whiteness has been an unstable category. White people do not exist in any physical sense, and historians have shown that precise legal applications of whiteness and related racial hierarchies have shifted depending on time and place, although these definitions have been anchored in anti-Nativeness and anti-Blackness.³³ In law, racial classification was an imprecise tool for denying access to state-organized goods such as political participation, due process, and schooling.³⁴ Historically, whiteness has been a lucrative category for those who could access it—members of marginalized groups in various time periods and places such as Irish, Italians, and Jews, as well as those of African and Latin American descent who could “pass.”³⁵ Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people raced as Asian saw a major transformation in white Americans’ treatment of them in law and society, from framing them as the “Yellow Peril” and making them objects of lynching to the emergence of the “model minority” myth that resulted in a fundamentally different experience from Black Americans and others.³⁶ Yet Asian Americans were still targets of racist and conceptual violence, and those who did not fit the racist stereotype in ethnicity and behavior have been raced differently.³⁷ In recent years, political leaders and media have weaponized racist stereotypes of Asian success (ignoring their fundamentally different experience with American racism) to buttress racist stereotypes of Black failure.³⁸

Outside of formal laws of exclusion and segregation, however, whiteness has been advanced through other means, from private organizations and agreements, popular culture, school curricula, and economic behavior, to outright defiance by legal authorities against those of other jurisdictions. Gaining access to white goods in one particular sphere of law and custom—say, when Mexican or Chinese children were classified as white to gain access to white schools by a court ruling—has never been a guarantee of access to white goods in other legal jurisdictions, in daily practice, or in the face of white vigilantism.³⁹

Importantly, while whiteness has accorded opportunities and privileges relative to other groups, it also cost its members politically and psychologically. In the former case, whiteness has divided working-class Americans, providing white workers a psychological “wage,” as Du Bois put it, but at the cost of achieving real social reform through political solidarity with non-whites and tolerating deep economic inequalities for the palliative effect of superior racial status.⁴⁰ Moreover, as Derrick Bell and others have observed, the kind of “black and white” thinking that sustains whiteness gives white children a damaged view of their understanding of themselves and of others.⁴¹

Because whiteness is a category of social dominance (and not just a form of difference), a white “good” would be something that is useful to white people as the dominant racialized group in relation to other subordinated racialized groups. White goods are, by definition, non-white harms. That white goods are designed to benefit white people does not mean, of course, that they cannot be useful to non-whites. Obviously they can. But because a white good must advantage white people more than other people by definition, a white good will be less useful to non-whites than to whites. White goods are relative as well as absolute. In fact, when non-white people participate in a white good, their very participation reinforces an underlying system that favors white people.

Likewise, identifying the existence of white goods does not mean denying the poverty and oppression of people who are white, or that white goods benefit every single white person in every instance. White goods are categorical. They exist in the aggregate. They offer unfair advantages in an already unfair system that allocates many harms to many people—women, differently abled, gender nonconforming, and the like. Finally, as I will explore later, white goods depend on violence.

It is important at this point to distinguish between a white good and the tempting idea of a “racial good.” The problem with naming something a “racial good” is that race is not a general category of social difference; it is a specific category of social dominance and subordination. There can be racial things, but a racial good is by definition also a racial harm, since race is a system of domination. The difference depends on which “race” we are talking about. The racial paradigm, globally, is known and needs no abstraction—indeed, abstracting becomes its own sort of racial project by denying the very real power of whiteness as a global and local variable in human relations.⁴² Likewise, limited attempts at a theory of “relational goods” obscures or ignores real-world racism and the allocation of relational harms.⁴³ This aspect of white things—that they have no equivalent for other groups—means that non-white people often have to navigate them, as sociologist Elijah Anderson explains, “as a condition of their existence.”⁴⁴

Schooling in the United States is a nearly ideal example of a white good. Historically, the maintenance of white advantage has been a primary political goal of schooling, and until the 1970s, an overt one.⁴⁵ This was not accidental. Common schools developed in the nineteenth century were not for a public that happened to be white. White Americans designed common schools during a time when the United States was a diverse society that allocated different civic statuses to different people depending on the myth of race. When white-controlled governments regulated the education of other groups, they did so with the understanding that these regulations would reinforce the system that white people built for themselves.

Today, schooling is a social practice that launders white social advantage (inherited and updated) in the name of merit. Yes, schooling can be beneficial for everyone, and yes, many non-whites can succeed brilliantly while many whites can fail. And also, non-white people have generated their own goods as acts of self-determination and resistance within the schools designed for the good of people who are white. But resistance adds cost and risk, and not having to resist is an advantage conferred on children who identify, and were allowed to identify, as white.⁴⁶

When African American parents tell their children they will have to work twice as hard for half as much, they are espousing an economic theory of schooling as a white good—that schooling is critically important for their children's lives and also that it something designed for their relative disadvantage.

III. Mechanisms

Beginning with the regulation of Black learning in the slaveholding South and the formation of common schooling in the North, white Americans have used formal education as the key mechanism for racial reproduction. White Americans have used nearly every aspect of schooling to reproduce the existence of their group and its advantages—to give meaning and value to white-occupied spaces, support group identity formation, create and valorize white history, language, and literature, allocate cultural and social capital, create jobs, promote religion, develop individual and collective human capital, provide corporate welfare, childcare, social certification, and more. Non-whites have succeeded in using many of these aspects of schooling too, but at greater cost, with greater precarity, and at greater risk.

In this section I briefly sketch three of the prime mechanisms of schooling as a white good: land use and school placement; the design and enactment of school curricula; and the control of opportunity.

This Land Is My Land

From the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth, Europeans conquered, commodified, and “developed” a vast swath of territory—some three million square miles of the earth's surface in what became the lower forty-eight states. Land was the cause of war, the basis of wealth, and the driver of politics and law.⁴⁷ Control of places became a key mechanism that white Americans have used to maintain their advantage over people they raced as others.

After the revolution of 1776, state and federal governments began selling former Native homelands, which they called “the public domain” to encourage the development of schooling.⁴⁸ In higher education, for example, some eleven million acres of Native homelands were commodified by the Morrill Act of 1862 to support state colleges and universities.⁴⁹ The commodification of Native homelands to support common schooling overshadowed the higher-ed land grants by an order of magnitude. Between 1795 and 1912, state and federal governments granted 129 million acres of land for common schools—an area nearly the size of France.⁵⁰ By the end of the nineteenth century, most states west of the Mississippi received more than 10 percent of their school budgets from federal (or in Texas, state) land grants.⁵¹ Historians once focused on the efficiency of this process, but the important point is not whether white settlers did it well, but that they did it at all—creating incalculable harm to Indigenous people for the benefit of schooling as a white good.⁵²

Once “settled,” white people organized society spatially in ways that contained and constrained non-whites. Schooling has been central to that process, as many scholars in our field have shown.⁵³ The political economy of places varied by region, but the centrality of white advantage was a core principle of educational regulation and development across all regions. In the pre-Civil War South, formal education was highly exclusive to white people, regulated, closely monitored, and enforced through extreme physical and psychological violence. Nevertheless, when the white interest was served by non-white schooling, for example, when enslaved and free Black laborers’ literacy and numeracy could be profitable, it was allowed, as Frederick Douglas experienced in the port city of Baltimore.⁵⁴ In New England, white people increased restrictions on Black participation in a wide range of social goods simultaneously with the common school reform movement, and famously used mob violence and legal procedure in tandem to block Black students from attending schools, arguing that such institutions would encourage Black in-migration and affect real estate values.⁵⁵ In the Midwest and, increasingly, the West, white governments restricted Black settlement, and often excluded those Black people who did settle from using common schools through explicit laws or mob violence.⁵⁶ White delegates of the future state of Illinois avoided putting the provision of schooling in the state constitution, for fear that it would attract Black people to the state.⁵⁷

When white homesteaders from the Midwest hit the Oregon Trail in 1843, they carried their twin commitments to common schools and white supremacy with them. The common schools in Oregon were legally white-only schools since, starting in 1844, the territorial government enacted a series of laws attempting to expel all Black people. Oregonians later wrote Black exclusion into their original state constitution, which the US Congress approved in the very same year, 1857, that the Supreme Court ruled that no Black person could be a United States citizen.⁵⁸

In what Kate Masur calls the “First Civil Rights Movement,” Native and Black people, together with some whites, fought back.⁵⁹ Before emancipation, some enslaved people secretly managed to steal a formal education despite the law and the lash; in other cases, enslaved people resisted white bans on education by informally educating their children during the quotidian interactions of daily life.⁶⁰ Free Black people in the North strategically resisted overt exclusion from schooling by asserting rights claims at the local level, by giving speeches, writing, holding conventions, lobbying, and litigation. The results of their long struggle were the Reconstruction Amendments, pushing existing systems in the North to accept non-white children, and building new, state-supported school systems in the South.⁶¹

During and after Reconstruction, however, white people adapted to these changes, applying exclusion to new groups (notably Mexican and Chinese in the West), expanding boarding schools for Native children, and developing the interrelated practices of spatial and bureaucratic segregation in ways that ensured white advantage.⁶² In its Plessy decision of 1896, the Supreme Court gave federal legal cover to segregation as a strategy of white supremacy, arguing, illogically, that providing services separately according to categories of domination (races) was legally permissible as long as the allocation of services was equal.⁶³

From the 1880s to the 1970s (and, some argue, even to the present day), white people used terrorism, local police agencies, real estate law, private associations, and private agreements to remove and exclude Black people from small towns and desirable spaces in and around cities across the North, with the express purpose of hoarding supposedly “public” goods like safety, transportation, health care, and schooling.⁶⁴ In the South, whites united across social classes to erect Jim Crow through law and extralegal violence, and, when able, adopted northern methods of spatial organization.⁶⁵ In the West, whites deployed numerous “strategies of segregation” against Native and Mexican people, as well as Black migrants.⁶⁶ Americans ordered and reordered their spaces around the allocation of white advantage—making sure that goods like schools were in fact white goods.

The racial ordering of space allowed white people to create deeply unequal systems of school funding based on local real estate value and other indicators of whiteness.⁶⁷ This forced non-whites to pay more for less schooling while enabling whites, especially as they gained wealth, to pay less for more.⁶⁸ Place-based inequalities have always been a real phenomenon among white people, too;⁶⁹ but the “color line,” as Du Bois put it, created a whole new order of white goods in most of the country.⁷⁰ Race-based inequalities in taxation were compounded by white political control of school boards. And even as they did this, white Americans developed a political ideology of taxpayer citizenship that framed minoritized people as dependents, dullards, delinquents, and thieves who were undeserving of well-funded schools.⁷¹

Middle-class Black Americans, on the other hand, often felt they were more deserving of schooling than whites, since the paid a double tax for Black and white children's education.⁷² Non-white people across the country resisted the exclusion, segregation, and related forms of white control throughout the twentieth century—in courts, by organizing, giving public speeches, writing for popular audiences, and also in their everyday behavior: crossing and challenging segregated boundaries, resisting boarding schools and segregated schools, challenging white-controlled teachers’ unions, building early-childhood programs, flexing political muscle in municipal politics, and asserting community control despite white advantage.⁷³ African Americans in particular widely shared the goal of dismantling formal segregation, but committed to integration unevenly and strategically depending on their local circumstance.⁷⁴ Their greatest victories were in law.⁷⁵

But, as the first wave of critical race theorists observed, the neutering of overt racial discrimination was clearly insufficient. And once again the Supreme Court ruled in favor of white goods, determining in several key cases in the 1970s that legal categories historically designed to protect white dominance—segregated school districts and property tax laws—did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.⁷⁶ These structures of white advantage continue to operate within “school choice” models today.⁷⁷

The Bright White Gaslight

“It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7,” said James Baldwin, “to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”⁷⁸

For two hundred years schooling in the United States has provided a formal education rooted in colonial knowledge—defining civic insiders and outsiders, framing right and wrong perspectives, promoting “facts” from geography and science—all with white settler identity at the core.⁷⁹

The school curriculum for the masses has not reflected a practice of teaching and learning a body of knowledge for the public good, nor has acquiring that knowledge been a good equally for everyone. On the contrary, schooling has, and continues to be, a practice of teaching and learning a body of knowledge that promotes white advantage through conceptual violence to non-white people, as Baldwin described. Historical studies of school textbooks have found white superiority, non-white inferiority, and the erasure of critical voices and histories to be themes from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.⁸⁰ This pattern was not uniform or progressive; during certain historical moments where white interest and strong political pressure for racial justice converged, white-authored curriculum softened and non-white perspectives appeared, most notably with the introduction of Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month.⁸¹ The very existence of Black History Month is evidence of the centering of whiteness as everyday, normalized experience, as well as the ongoing struggle to resist it.

Even as they have been compelled to participate in the white good of colonial knowledge, non-white children, parents, teachers, and community members have resisted, co-opted, and ignored it through more than just the observance of Black History Month—although doing so has required cost and risk. In recent years historians of education have expanded our understanding of non-white teachers, students, and communities—Black, Native, Puerto Rican, Native Hawaiian, and others—who worked as activists to undermine and resist white schooling from within the system.⁸² Black teachers have engaged in their work in a variety of ways, through ethics of care and community uplift, active and passive resistance to white supremacy in the schoolhouse, and political activism outside outside of it.⁸³ Jarvis Givens has characterized the history of Black teaching and learning in the United States as forms of “fugitivity”—that is, operating outside the laws and expectations of schooling for the white good.⁸⁴

Higher education gave whiteness its pedigree.⁸⁵ Litwack famously chastised American historians for “the miseducation of American youth” with regard to race.⁸⁶ “The scholarly monographs and textbooks they authored,” he said, “perpetuated and reinforced an array of racial stereotypes and myths and easily justified the need to repress and quarantine black people.”⁸⁷ Charles Mills offered a similarly withering critique of the field of philosophy; critical race theorists have exploded the field of law and legal studies.⁸⁸ John Dewey famously defined democracy as a mode of associated living, and imagined classrooms as spaces where knowledge flows like liquid among community members of equal standing, or between and among smaller “publics.” Yet in his forty books and over seven hundred articles, Dewey never directly confronted the problem of white supremacy for classroom teaching and learning, or for knowledge production.⁸⁹ His philosophy was the ideal vehicle for schooling as a white good, gaslighting the obvious—indeed central—project of white supremacy.

Colleges and universities have historically existed to promote the white good to their foundations, as Craig Steven Wilder has demonstrated.⁹⁰ Even institutions designed for the benefit of non-white students at the end of the nineteenth century have historically struggled to contend with culture, knowledge, oversight, philanthropy, regulation, law, and a K-12 education system that do non-white harm.⁹¹ Likewise, mid-twentieth-century colorblind access programs like the GI Bill and federal student loans paradoxically provided more financial access for racialized people but also reinforced white advantage by failing to consider the broader harms of white supremacy: lower family wealth, less access to college preparation in high school, and discrimination in admissions, not to mention the questions of whether faculty, staff, and curricular content were oriented toward the success of non-white people once they arrived on campus.⁹² Much of what is recognizably non-white about knowledge production, teaching, and learning in American higher education is the result of activism by students, families, faculty, and communities of color.⁹³ Higher education institutions, historically, have not led on the question of the public good because that has not been their mission. Most often, they have been forced by students who took great personal risk, paid steep costs, and even died, to move higher ed toward something resembling a public good. We are not there yet—not by a long shot.

Hobbling

A third, critically important mechanism of schooling as a white good is the ability to control mobility, a process I have called hobbling.⁹⁴

Economists, sociologists, and historians of education hold up schooling as the single most important factor in social mobility—indeed, one economist recently penned a guest essay for the New York Times declaring that “schooling is for mobility,” touting more schooling as the obvious solution for Black poverty.⁹⁵ This racially naive view of what schooling has done to Black and brown people over the last two centuries is standard fare for the field of economics. When we recognize the history of schooling as white good, and the tightly integrated, deliberately constructed relationship between school formation, location, regulation, quality, curricular tracking, and white advantage, however, schooling in the United States appears to be less about mobility for everyone, and more about hobbling Black and brown children.⁹⁶

I use the word hobbling advisedly. For millennia, people have used hobbling as a form of mobility reduction to the point of domination. In the context of the racial enslavement system of the nineteenth-century United States, enslavers used physical and psychological disfigurement, as well as mechanical devices, to prevent the mobility of enslaved people out of their enslavement. As white Americans developed and then expanded their schooling practices, they used schooling as a means to hobble Black and brown children as members of society—both in terms of limiting their access to academic development and credentials acquisition, and in terms of their access to skills development. Schooling as a white good has been a key contributor to Black and brown poverty, and one of the primary engines of white advantage.

Educational hobbling is an aggregative and relative process, not an individual and isolated one. The expansion of school attainment for non-white children over the long twentieth century, by some measures, is not the point. The point is that relative school attainment, on the aggregate, has remained quite unequal for the targets of whiteness: brown and especially Black children. As a white good, schooling on the whole has historically made it harder and riskier for many children of color to compete with white children in the “zero sum game” of schooling.⁹⁷ You might even say twice as hard, for half as much.

Economic theories of human capital development are equally naive. For example, historians of education have recently made the case that the twentieth century was, for the United States, the human capital century.⁹⁸ This claim, following a long tradition of classical economic theory dating to the 1950s, argues that states have incentives to train their workforce. The main evidence its proponents cite with regard to race is the slow closing of enrollment rates by race over the course of the century. What they do not consider is the long history of wide and deliberately constructed differences in the quality of education available to children of color within schools—not just the curriculum that does conceptual violence, but career tracking and the disparate opportunities for postsecondary education rooted in household wealth, the availability of extracurricular opportunities, and the white American investment in deskilling brown and Black children in terms of their political capital and opportunity in the workplace.⁹⁹

Of course, schooling as a white good has been only partially successful in hobbling Black and brown children. Racialized children and families and racialized schools face relative aggregate disadvantages; but there are many examples of excellent schools and teachers and successful, thriving children. Historians of education are increasingly recovering these stories of resistance, efficacy, and excellence. Moreover, when schools fail them, people of color have historically created their own groups and organizations, their own bodies of knowledge, their own joys and markers of a civic belonging and a good life. Religious bodies, civic organizations, fraternity and sorority family networks, and community groups all help provide capital when their schools do not. People of color have also leveraged the mainstream political system to achieve educational change.¹⁰⁰

IV. Violence

So far my argument begs the question: How did white Americans maintain their advantages in schooling, when people of color have put up so much resistance?

The very short answer is that schooling as a white good was built with violence, has been maintained by violence, and does violence. While the patterns and mechanisms of violence have changed, there is a traceable through-line from colonial-era settlement and enslavement to twenty-first-century school-to-prison pipelines and backflows. It is extremely difficult to take a theory of schooling as a public good seriously when we see just how far white Americans have been willing to go to keep from sharing it.

From the collapse of Reconstruction to the mid-twentieth century, white people across all regions of the country continued to use extreme forms of violence and terrorism to defend white goods—especially schooling—with impunity and even with the assistance of legal authorities. Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative estimates that between 1865 and 1950, Americans committed some 6,500 lynchings. Some of these were committed against deviant whites, but most were against non-whites—Chinese, Mexican, Native, and especially Black Americans—as forms of overt racial terrorism.¹⁰¹ In coordination with this violence, police and property law agencies reinforced spatial and political boundaries.¹⁰² White mobs committed massacres against entire non-white communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Wounded Knee, South Dakota (1890); Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Springfield (1908) and East St. Louis (1917), Illinois; Slocum (1910) and Porvenir (1918), Texas; Washington, DC (1919), which the community repulsed; Ocoee, Florida (1920); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921), to name but a few.¹⁰³ Between 1917 and 1921, Black homes in Chicago were bombed, on average, once every twenty days.¹⁰⁴ Black people in the South who asserted their claim to schooling as a public good in even the smallest ways were subject to sanctions ranging from job loss to incarceration, terrorism, torture, enslavement on chain gangs, and, of course, murder. Legal instruments such as restrictive covenants and redlined federal loan maps were part of the process too; but they came later in the game, adding new tools by which white people could dominate public goods through violently racializing space and converting that violence into legally legitimated property ownership.¹⁰⁵

The violence has changed since state and federal governments stepped up enforcement against overt racial terrorism in the late 1960s and ’70s. Instead, the last half-century has added a whole new arsenal against our non-white children: zero-tolerance punishment regimes in schools and, outside of them, the coordinated massification of criminal justice.¹⁰⁶

The scale and racial disproportionality of criminal legal processing for the last forty years are historically unprecedented and difficult to exaggerate. Before the mid-1970s the US locked up between 100 and 150 people per 100,000 in jails and state and federal prisons, a rate larger than but commensurate with other wealthy nations. Between 1970 and 2010, that rate exploded to over 750 per 100,000. Well over two million people. The disparate impact on Black and brown men has been severe. According to The Sentencing Project, of all American men born in 2001, one in seventeen white men, one in six Latinx men, and one in three Black men, will spend some time imprisoned.¹⁰⁷

So-called proactive policing has had similar disproportionate racial effects. In a single year, for example, NYPD police stopped and patted down 80 percent of African American adolescents ages 16-17, compared with rates of 38 percent and 10 percent for Hispanics and whites, respectively.¹⁰⁸ School attendance of Black boys dropped during periods when the NYPD was saturating their neighborhoods, a drop not seen for other children.¹⁰⁹ Michelle Alexander has provocatively referred to the rise of this criminal justice regime as the “New Jim Crow,” alerting us to the long tradition of state violence against non-white people in the United States.¹¹⁰

Schools mirrored and collaborated with criminal justice. Zero-tolerance punishment regimes upped the consequences and reduced teacher discretion for alleged bad behavior in school.¹¹¹ School “safety” reforms expanded the presence of sworn police officers in schools, especially schools serving primarily non-white children.¹¹² Not surprisingly, Black and brown children have been punished more often, and more severely, than white children for similar offenses. The interlocking pushout factors of lower quality, more punitive, and more highly segregated schooling, in combination with the massification of policing and incarceration, led scholars in 2003 to start referring to a “school-to-prison pipeline.”¹¹³ Flipping the pipeline metaphor on its head, social science research shows equally devastating effects of proactive policing and mass imprisonment outside of schools on children's performance in them.¹¹⁴ Personal, familial, or even vicarious contact with police has negative effects on school performance, political socialization, and health.¹¹⁵ In some minoritized school districts in the United States, that means a majority of children are affected.¹¹⁶

Conclusion

So what does seeing schooling as a white good get us?

First, I ended the body of my argument on the theme of violence because it's critically important to recognize that the little white schoolhouse, that so-called laboratory of democracy on the endless Western frontier, rested on non-white harms. The worst harms. It's problematic in our work as historians to view schooling as a white good with romantic nostalgia, unless we are recovering stories of resistance, empowerment, and justice. Whose history are we writing?

Second, turning schooling from a white good into something resembling a public good calls all of us to the work of writing racism back into the many subfields of the history of education. I think it's fair to say that there is enough access to primary evidence and secondary scholarship now that there is no area of educational history in the United States where we can shrug off the role of race as unknowable. Whiteness has colored all the parts of schooling—teaching and learning, curriculum, placement, sex and gender, policy, religion, punishment, pop culture, early-childhood and higher education, international and global expansion, even the methods we use and archives we inhabit.

Third, historians can play a critically important role in moving schooling from a white good to a public one. Understanding the specific mechanisms of schooling as a white good points us toward pathways for making it a public good.

This work requires “both/and” thinking. By that I mean formal education is critical to human flourishing and the health of a just and democratic society. Schooling as a method of education has historically delivered a great many goods. That same schooling has delivered a great many harms, too—not only absolute harms, but relative ones. Our work as historians of education entails explaining how schooling as a social practice has, historically, done both.