The White Fairness Understanding Gap

Educators, policy-makers, activists, and academics regularly decry and claim to offer solutions to the problem that Blacks tend to score significantly lower than whites on standardized academic achievement tests. It is interesting, then, to read the results of a survey conducted last Spring by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, and Harvard University. According to this high-profile research, whites are far behind Blacks when it comes to grasping elementary facts of American social, economic, and political reality. “Large numbers of white Americans incorrectly believe,” the Post reports, “that Blacks are as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schools, and health care.”

For some time now, most white Americans have wrongly believed that blacks enjoy equal opportunity. Now white false consciousness in racial matters appears to be escalating into a profoundly distorted image of social and economic outcomes. African-Americans polled in the survey showed a much stronger grasp of reality regarding racial inequity. When the test subject is fairness, whites lag significantly behind blacks in the United States.

Is this a paradox when whites score higher on academic achievement tests? No, for at least five interrelated reasons. First, the American educational curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade is notoriously conservative on questions of social, racial, and economic justice. Meaningful ideological controversy is taboo in history classes and texts that portray America as a virtually classless land of equal opportunity. Such texts and lessons hardly equip students to understand the unequal distribution of wealth, income, and power between Blacks and whites. They shame minority and poor children, encouraging those kids to disengage from school, thereby contributing to the black-white test-score gap.

Second, there's no substitute for experience when it comes to grasping social reality. White Americans tend to understand Black experience in exceedingly abstract and distant terms, on the basis of projected fears and fantasies fed by a white-owned corporate media that showers them with disproportionately affluent images of African-Americans. Third, that media has long been feeding Americans a steady diet of misleading and provocative news bites on affirmative action for minorities and especially for Blacks. Exaggerating the extent to which whites have suffered from that policy, this coverage has interacted toxically with nearly three decades of relative income stagnation and even decline for masses of white Americans to stoke the fires of white racial illusion. Confronting economic insecurity in their daily experience and viewing rich African-Americans and the alleged excesses of affirmative action and “multiculturalism” on their televisions, millions of whites now think that Blacks have caught up with the majority race.

Fourth, white America's unreal picture of Black reality is reinforced by the persistent hyper-segregation of American communities by race and class. In Chicago, home to the nation's largest contiguous settlement of African-Americans, researchers estimate that 80 percent of Blacks would have to move if they wished to live in a neighborhood whose racial composition matched that of the city as a whole. There, as elsewhere, poverty and such related social indicators as unemployment, single-parent families, and the possession of criminal records are very disproportionately concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Four out of five U.S. whites live in virtually all-white neighborhoods and nearly 9 in 10 suburbanites live in communities that are less than 1 percent black.

Nowhere, fittingly enough, is racial segregation more strikingly evident than in the schools. Nearly 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and “inherently unequal,” the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has recently reported, school “re-segregation” has been underway for at least ten years. It is “happening,” the Civil Rights Project finds, “despite the nation's growing diversity” and “is contributing to a growing gap in quality between the schools being attended by white students and those serving a large proportion of minority students”—a gap that receives curiously little mention in standard pronouncements on the black-white test-score gap. “More than 70% of the nation's black students,” the Project reports, “now attend predominantly minority schools,” whereas “whites on average attend schools where less than 20% of the students are from all of the other racial and ethnic groups combined.” With little substantive connection to the actual daily lives of African-Americans from childhood on, whites rely excessively on racial myths encouraged by dominant ideological paradigms positing color-blind equality of opportunity as an achieved reality and racism as a thing of the past.