How Higher Ed Re-Segregated | Gary Orfield | TMR

The book "The Walls Around Opportunity" by Gary Orfield explores how colorblind policies have made college inaccessible to many students of color, leading to profound racial gaps in higher education. Orfield argues that policies that acknowledge racial inequalities and set racial equality goals can succeed where colorblindness has failed. He describes how the Reagan era ushered in colorblind policies that ignore the realities of color inequality and have resegregated public schools, exacerbated inequalities in college preparation, and denied financial aid to families. The book proposes real solutions to make higher education available to all and features commentaries by Stella Flores and James Anderson. Overall, the book paints a troubling portrait of American higher education and its impact on communities of color and the nation.

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Check out more from the MR crew:

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On the phone, we have Gary Orfield professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA author of the walls around the opportunity of the failure of colorblind policy for higher education. Professor, thanks for joining us. a pleasure to be with you. Let's start with the failure of a colorblind policy. Give us a sense of just what constitutes a failure? Like what are we trying to achieve here? well historically in the United States colleges before the Civil Rights Revolution were virtually all white. There's only a token presence of students of color. In some places none at all. That was considered a colorblind policy by the colleges at that time. Nothing really changed until the colleges decided to change it. Partially because they were required to in the South by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and in the rest of the country because they decided to or were pressured to by their own students and communities. and to get the colleges significantly desegregated or significantly diverse they had to consider race because there was such a systematically unequal preparation. if they use the traditional standards of Recruitment and admissions it wouldn't work. basically, that was the discovery of the Civil Rights Revolution in general. if you just said we should not discriminate in terms of voting rights nothing changed. you had to actually require it to change. you had to have a plan to change it. That's what the college just discovered in the 1960s. when they began to become diverse significantly. and since then the vast majority of celestial colleges have had race-conscious admissions of one form or another. and there has been a succession of battles in the Supreme Court to try to defend it or on the side of conservatives to get rid of it. One thing I did not I was not aware of was that in the 1970s the gap between black and white students in higher education relative to their population in the country had come close to closing. I was not aware of that. yes right around 1977 and 1978 there was a one-time American history when students of color were equally as likely to enrollment College as white students. that doesn't mean they graduated. but at least they enrolled at very very similar levels that were right around the time of the Supreme Court decision first Supreme Court affirmative action decision in the Bakke case.