About This Unit

This unit treats the school — the classroom, the curriculum, the admissions office, the schoolyard — not as a neutral institution that transmits knowledge to a pre-existing citizenry, but as one of the central institutions through which the United States has produced its racial order and imagined its nation. Module 1's argument that race is made rather than discovered moves here from the laboratory, the clinic, and the customs hall into the schoolhouse. Education is where the state has decided who may learn alongside whom, what counts as knowledge worth transmitting, and which children are prepared for full membership in the political community. From the criminalization of Black literacy under slavery, through the long regime of de jure and de facto segregation, to the contemporary battles over admissions and curriculum, schooling has been a primary site at which racial hierarchy is both enforced and contested.

Two linked arcs organize the unit. The first concerns education as a racialized project of nation-building: the segregated school, the Black teaching tradition that Jarvis Givens names fugitive pedagogy, the constitutional rupture of Brown v. Board of Education, and the resegregation that has followed in the decades since. The second concerns the politics of remediation and its discontents: affirmative action, the ideology of "color-blindness" that has been mobilized against it, and the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-conscious admissions in higher education. Read together, the two arcs show that schooling does not simply reflect a racial order produced elsewhere; it is one of the institutions in which that order is continuously made, defended, dismantled, and remade. The analytical vocabulary the unit develops — segregation and resegregation, fugitive pedagogy, color-blind racism, educational opportunity — equips learners to read present-day struggles over schools and universities as continuations of a long racial history rather than departures from it.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain how schooling has operated as an institutional site of nation-building in which racial categories and hierarchies are produced, enforced, and contested.
• Analyze the Black educational tradition — including the concept of fugitive pedagogy — as a response to the racialized exclusion and surveillance of Black learning.
• Trace the legal and political arc from school segregation through Brown v. Board of Education to contemporary resegregation, and assess what the persistence of segregation reveals about the limits of legal remedy.
• Apply the concept of color-blind racism to the debate over affirmative action and the 2023 SFFA v. Harvard decision, distinguishing race-conscious from putatively race-neutral framings of educational opportunity.

Keywords

• School segregation
• Fugitive pedagogy
• Affirmative action
• Resegregation
• Color-blind racism
• Educational opportunity
• Racialization
• Nation-building

Open Educational Resources

• Givens, Jarvis R. "Book Talk: American Grammar by Jarvis R. Givens." 2025. Watch the book talk.

Video · Open access (YouTube).

In this recorded talk, Givens presents the argument of American Grammar, his study of the Black educational tradition and the place of literacy and schooling in the long history of African American life. Building on his earlier work on fugitive pedagogy — the clandestine and subversive teaching practices Black educators developed under conditions where Black learning was criminalized or surveilled — Givens situates the school as a contested terrain on which the meanings of citizenship, freedom, and national belonging have been worked out. The talk introduces learners to the historical depth of Black educational thought, the role of Black teachers as keepers of a counter-tradition, and the idea that the "grammar" of American schooling has encoded racial assumptions about who is fit to learn and to lead. Learners will encounter the framework that anchors the unit's treatment of education as a site of nation-building before turning to the book itself in Key Scholarship.

• "Panel Discussion: History of U.S. Education: What's Race Got To Do With It?" Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University. 2022. Watch the panel.

Video · Open access (YouTube).

This panel, hosted by Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center, brings together historians and scholars of education to examine the entanglement of race and schooling across U.S. history. The discussion ranges across the criminalization of enslaved people's literacy, the establishment of segregated school systems, the constitutional confrontation of Brown v. Board of Education, and the persistence of inequality in the decades that followed. Panelists treat education not as a story of steady progress toward inclusion but as a recurring site of struggle in which racial hierarchies have been built into the structure of schooling itself. Learners will encounter multiple scholarly perspectives in conversation, a useful orientation to the historiographical debates the unit engages, and a framing of race and education as inseparable from the larger project of defining the nation and its citizens.

• King, Martin Luther, Jr. "Desegregation and the Future." Address delivered at the annual luncheon of the National Committee for Rural Schools, December 15, 1956. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Read the address.

Primary source · Open access (Stanford King Institute).

In this 1956 address, delivered in the wake of the Brown decision and at the height of massive resistance to school desegregation, King reflects on the meaning of desegregation and the work that lay ahead. The speech distinguishes between the legal dismantling of segregation and the deeper transformation of attitudes, institutions, and structures of opportunity that genuine integration would require. King argues that the end of de jure segregation was a beginning rather than a culmination, and that achieving the promise of Brown would demand sustained moral and political struggle. Learners encounter a primary source from the immediate post-Brown moment, in the words of one of the period's central figures, and can read it against the unit's later material on the resegregation that has unfolded in the decades since — testing King's distinction between legal desegregation and substantive integration against the historical record.

• "Brown v. Board of Education (1954)." Milestone Documents, National Archives. View the document.

Primary source · Open access (National Archives).

The National Archives' Milestone Documents entry presents the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which held that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy v. Ferguson. The page provides the text and historical context of the ruling. Learners encounter the foundational legal document of school desegregation in its own language, including the Court's reasoning about the psychological and civic harms of segregation. The decision is the constitutional hinge of the unit's first arc; reading it directly allows learners to assess both what it accomplished and what it left unresolved, and to weigh it against the patterns of resegregation documented in the unit's other resources.

• "Ruby Bridges." National Women's History Museum. Read the biography.

Biographical resource · Open access (National Women's History Museum).

This biographical entry recounts the experience of Ruby Bridges, who in 1960 became the first Black child to integrate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, escorted by federal marshals past hostile crowds. The account places her story within the broader history of school desegregation and the resistance that met it, illustrating how the abstract legal principle of Brown was enacted — and contested — in the lives of individual children and families. Learners encounter the human and local dimension of desegregation, a counterpoint to the legal and statistical material elsewhere in the unit, and a concrete instance of the gap between a court ruling and its implementation on the ground.

• Reardon, Sean F., et al. The Segregation Explorer. Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Explore the data.

Interactive data tool · Open access (Stanford Educational Opportunity Project).

The Segregation Explorer is an interactive data tool from Stanford's Educational Opportunity Project that visualizes patterns of racial and economic school segregation across U.S. districts, counties, and states over time. Drawing on enrollment and demographic data, the tool allows users to examine how segregation has changed since the era of court-ordered desegregation, where it has intensified, and how racial and economic segregation interact. Learners can investigate segregation in regions or districts they know, generating concrete evidence about the contemporary landscape of school segregation. The tool grounds the unit's claim about resegregation in measurable patterns and gives learners a means to test general arguments against specific local data — an empirical complement to the unit's historical and legal materials.

• "The U.S. Student Population Is More Diverse, but Schools Are Still Highly Segregated." NPR. July 14, 2022. Read the report.

News article · Open access (NPR).

This NPR report summarizes findings from a U.S. Government Accountability Office study on the persistence of school segregation, documenting that despite the increasing diversity of the national student population, large numbers of schools remain segregated by race and class. The article connects these patterns to housing segregation, district boundary lines, and policy choices, situating contemporary segregation as a structural rather than incidental outcome. Learners encounter an accessible synthesis of recent evidence on resegregation and a bridge between the historical narrative of desegregation and the present-day reality, reinforcing the unit's argument that the racial order in education is continuously reproduced rather than progressively dissolved.

Key Scholarship

• Givens, Jarvis R. American Grammar. New York: HarperCollins, 2025. Access the book.

Book.

In American Grammar, Givens develops his account of the Black educational tradition and the long struggle over Black literacy and learning in the United States. Extending the framework of fugitive pedagogy he introduced in earlier work, Givens argues that schooling has carried an implicit "grammar" — a set of racial assumptions about who is fit to learn, to teach, and to lead — and that Black educators built a counter-tradition that subverted, evaded, and reimagined that grammar. The book treats Black teachers and students as agents who developed clandestine and oppositional practices of learning under conditions of criminalization and surveillance, and it situates the school within the broader project of defining the nation and its citizenry. Learners will encounter the unit's central framework for reading education as a site of racial nation-building, developed at length and grounded in historical evidence drawn from the Black educational past.

• Driver, Justin. The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education. New York: Pantheon, 2025. Access the book.

Book.

Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, examines the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-conscious admissions in higher education. Driver argues that both the conservative reading of the decision as a triumph of color-blindness and the progressive reading of it as the end of racial equity are mistaken. He contends that the post-SFFA regime places a new premium on applicants narrating their racial experience in admissions essays — entrenching, rather than dissolving, the racial categories the decision purported to set aside — and that the ruling nonetheless leaves universities significant room to pursue diversity through other means. Learners encounter a sustained analysis of the legal and institutional aftermath of SFFA, an argument that complicates the partisan framings of the case, and a treatment of how "color-blindness" operates as a legal and political doctrine in the contemporary university.

• Carter, J. Scott, and Cameron D. Lippard. The Death of Affirmative Action? Racialized Framing and the Fight Against Racial Preference in College Admissions. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020. Access the book.

Book.

Carter and Lippard, both sociologists, examine the affirmative action debate through sociological, policy, and legal lenses, analyzing how arguments for and against race-conscious admissions have been framed in U.S. Supreme Court cases. The authors trace how "color-blind" rhetoric was mobilized to reframe affirmative action and advance a political ideology, and they analyze the framing techniques opponents have used to make their arguments persuasive and to shift public attitudes. Drawing on legal documents and the discourse surrounding successive cases, the book treats the contest over affirmative action as a struggle over how race is talked about and made to matter — or made not to matter — in American institutions. Learners encounter a disciplinary account of affirmative action that foregrounds the role of racialized framing and color-blind ideology, complementing the legal focus of Driver's treatment of the same terrain.

• Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Access the book.

Book.

Bonilla-Silva argues that the dominant racial ideology of the post–civil rights United States is "color-blind racism" — a framework that explains and defends racial inequality through ostensibly nonracial language about merit, choice, culture, and the market, while disavowing racism as a matter of individual prejudice. Drawing on interview data, he identifies the recurring rhetorical frames through which white Americans rationalize racial disparities without invoking race directly, and he contends that this ideology sustains the racial order more effectively than the overt racism it replaced. Learners encounter the conceptual vocabulary of color-blind racism that the unit applies to the affirmative action debate and to "race-neutral" framings of educational policy. The book provides the analytical instrument for recognizing how appeals to neutrality and merit operate in struggles over admissions, segregation, and opportunity.

• Lewis, Amanda E. Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Access the book.

Book.

Lewis's ethnographic study examines how race is produced and negotiated in the everyday life of schools, drawing on fieldwork in three elementary schools — urban and suburban, racially mixed and predominantly white. She shows that schools are not passive settings in which racial attitudes formed elsewhere are merely expressed, but active sites where racial meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies are made through curriculum, discipline, peer interaction, and the routines of school life. Lewis attends to how color-blind framings operate in schools that understand themselves as fair and inclusive, often reproducing the very inequalities they disclaim. Learners encounter a close empirical account of the school as a racializing institution at the level of daily practice, grounding the unit's larger claims about education and nation-building in the granular reality of the classroom and the schoolyard.

Case Studies

• The Black Teacher Archive: Black Educational Timeline

Harvard Library · Digital archive and interactive timeline.

An interactive timeline and digital archive documenting the history of Black education and the Black teaching tradition in the United States. The case study uses the archive to examine how Black educators built and sustained a counter-tradition of learning across periods of legal exclusion, segregation, and reform, putting Givens's framework of fugitive pedagogy to work on primary archival material.

• Affirmative Action in the United States

Multi-source case study · Institute for Youth in Policy, New Economic Thinking, SCOTUSblog · 2023–2024.

A case study tracing the origins, evolution, and 2023 judicial dismantling of affirmative action in U.S. higher education, working across an institutional policy history, a present-day debate, and reporting on the SFFA v. Harvard decision. Learners read the construction and contestation of race-conscious admissions as a worked example of how "color-blind" framing reorganizes educational opportunity.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Givens, American Grammar: Givens argues that American schooling has carried an implicit "grammar" of racial assumptions about who is fit to learn and to lead, and that Black educators built a counter-tradition of fugitive pedagogy in response. Identify one feature of schooling — a practice, a routine, a structure, a curricular choice — that you would analyze as part of this racial "grammar." What would it mean to read that feature as something to be evaded or subverted rather than simply reformed?
2. On Brown v. Board of Education and King's "Desegregation and the Future": In 1956, King distinguished the legal end of segregation from the deeper transformation that genuine integration would require. Reading the Brown decision alongside King's address, assess this distinction against the present. Where has the legal dismantling of segregation succeeded, and where has the substantive integration King described failed to follow? Use the unit's data resources to ground your answer.
3. On the Segregation Explorer and the NPR report: The Stanford Segregation Explorer and the 2022 NPR report both document the persistence — and in places the intensification — of school segregation decades after Brown. Examine a district or region you know in the Explorer. What does the pattern you find suggest about whether segregation today is best understood as a residue of the past or as something actively reproduced by present-day policy and structure?
4. On Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Bonilla-Silva argues that color-blind racism explains racial inequality through ostensibly nonracial language about merit, choice, and fairness. Identify one argument in the contemporary debate over affirmative action — from any side — that you would analyze using his framework. What work is the language of "neutrality" or "merit" doing in that argument, and what does Bonilla-Silva's analysis reveal that the argument's own terms conceal?
5. On Driver and Carter & Lippard: Both works treat the affirmative action cases as a contest over how race is made to matter in admissions, but Driver writes as a legal scholar and Carter and Lippard as sociologists of racialized framing. Drawing on either work, articulate what the 2023 SFFA decision settled and what it left open. Does ending race-conscious admissions dissolve the role of race in admissions, or relocate it — and if it relocates it, to where?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit's two arcs — education as a project of racial nation-building (Givens, Brown, resegregation) and the politics of remediation and its discontents (affirmative action, color-blind racism, SFFA) — are not separate stories but two faces of the same history. Drawing on at least one reading from each arc, articulate how the school functions as an institution that makes and remakes the racial order rather than merely reflecting it. Which framework from the unit do you find most useful for reading a struggle over schools or universities that you know firsthand — and why?

Further Readings and Resources

• "Legalize Black Education: The Long Fight for the Right to Learn." Zinn Education Project. 2025. Access the resource.

Teaching resource · Open access (Zinn Education Project).

A teaching resource from the Zinn Education Project tracing the long history of legal restrictions on Black education — from the criminalization of literacy under slavery through the struggles for access that followed — and the persistent fight for the right to learn. The materials include lessons and primary sources suited to learners building historical background on the Black educational tradition that Givens analyzes.

• "Black History Month 100 Curriculum." Black History 100. Access the portal.

Educational portal · Open access.

An educational portal marking one hundred years of Black History Month, offering academic resources, lesson plans, and teaching materials for bringing Black history into classrooms. Learners and adopting instructors can draw on the portal for curricular materials and primary sources that extend the unit's treatment of Black education and the politics of curriculum.

• "Brown v. Board of Education 70th Anniversary." National Museum of African American History and Culture. Read the feature.

Museum feature · Open access (NMAAHC).

A retrospective feature from the National Museum of African American History and Culture marking the seventieth anniversary of the Brown decision. The feature reflects on the ruling's significance, its incomplete realization, and the ongoing struggle over educational equity, offering learners a curated institutional perspective on what Brown accomplished and what remains unfinished.

• "Timeline of Events Leading to the Brown v. Board of Education Decision of 1954." National Archives. View the timeline.

Timeline · Open access (National Archives).

A National Archives timeline charting the legal and historical developments that culminated in the 1954 Brown decision, including the earlier challenges to segregation that built toward it. Learners can use the timeline to situate Brown within the longer arc of litigation and organizing that preceded it rather than treating the decision as an isolated event.

• Hochschild, Jennifer L., and Francis X. Shen. "Race, Ethnicity, and Education Policy." Access the publication.

Scholarly publication.

A scholarly treatment of the relationship between race, ethnicity, and education policy in the United States, examining how policy debates over schooling have been shaped by — and have shaped — racial and ethnic divisions. Learners encounter an analytical overview connecting the unit's themes of segregation, opportunity, and policy to the broader field of education-policy scholarship.

• Affirmative Action at a Crossroads [Essay Collection]. University of Chicago Law Review. Read the collection.

Essay collection · Open access (University of Chicago Law Review).

An essay collection from the University of Chicago Law Review gathering legal scholars' perspectives on affirmative action at the moment of its judicial reckoning. The essays examine the doctrine, its rationales, and its possible futures from a range of positions. Learners can use the collection to encounter the legal debate over race-conscious admissions in greater depth and from multiple vantage points.

• "Affirmative Action." Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Read the entry.

Reference entry · Open access (Cornell LII).

A reference entry from Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute defining affirmative action and summarizing its legal history and current status. Learners can use the entry as a concise orientation to the legal terminology and case history that the unit's affirmative action materials engage.

• "Timeline: Affirmative Action." Annenberg Classroom. View the timeline.

Timeline · Open access (Annenberg Classroom).

An interactive timeline from Annenberg Classroom tracing the development of affirmative action policy and the sequence of Supreme Court cases that have shaped it. Learners can use the timeline to map the chronology of the affirmative action debate and to locate the 2023 SFFA decision within the longer history of race-conscious admissions litigation.

• "Supreme Court Guts Affirmative Action, Effectively Ending Race-Conscious Admissions." NPR. June 29, 2023. Read the report.

News article · Open access (NPR).

NPR's report on the day of the 2023 SFFA v. Harvard decision, summarizing the ruling, the Court's reasoning, and the dissents, along with initial reactions. Learners encounter contemporaneous coverage of the decision that ended race-conscious admissions, a useful complement to the scholarly analyses in Key Scholarship and to the affirmative action case study.