FOR MANY BLACK PEOPLE, integration is almost an obselete word. It is certainly not a goal for which oppressed black women now strive. Over the last 30 years, if female veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement have learned anything, they have learned how integration works in America with regard to black women. A few with middle-class training, values, and goals are taken into the white-dominated institutions of the society. Allowed presence and the illusion of power and acceptance, they become instruments the institutions try to use to accomplish two goals: to show the public that the particular institution is neither racist nor sexist and to control other black people, the non-middle class "unruly outsiders" (female and male) pressing the institution to change what the "outsiders" take to be discriminatory policies.
Black women have learned that integration for them has meant the same as it has meant for black men. Unless they are constantly on guard, they can become "tokens" by which social institutions attempt to reinforce the American myth that only a few blacks are intelligent enough or educable enough to be trained for success at the high decision-making levels of the society.
So, if by integration one means the thorough interconnection of masses of black people and masses of white people in interconnected social systems for the purpose of achieving the well-being of all the people, there has been no real integration of black people as a whole into American society. The question here, then, is not how integration has helped or hindered African-American women's activities and relationships. The question is: How has black people's contact (not integration) with American social systems and movements impacted upon those areas of black life in which black women have historically focused their time, energy, and concern?
There are three areas of black women's concern and three American social systems that need to be reviewed here. The areas of concern are the education of black children in what were supposed to be integrated public schools; the availability of adequate work to support black women and their families properly; and the relation between black women and black men. The American social systems and movements impacting these areas of concern are the public education system, the economic structure of American society, and the feminist movement in the society.
Public Education and "Integration"
THE ALARMING and depreciating condition of public school education in America can, in part, be attributed to the fallacious assumption most people made in 1954 when the Supreme Court decision integrated the nation's public schools. Many people thought integration of black children into predominantly white school systems automatically meant better education for black children.
From the beginning, however, there was a skewed notion of what integration meant. It was supposed to bring black children into already existing patterns of mainline American culture (read white) and introduce them to white models of thinking, acting, and accomplishment that—if taken seriously by black students—would prepare them for success in the educational process and in the world.
Few educators understood the extent to which integration had to be a two-way street if black children were to excel in the educational systems. That is, not only did black children have to be introduced to and accepted in the Eurocentric culture dominating in the public school systems. These systems, in turn, also had to be integrated by patterns of African-American culture and African-American models of intellect, accomplishment, and moral perspective. This would mean that for proper integration to occur in America, both black and white children would, in their educational careers, have to experience a process of integration at both physical and intellectual levels.
Because this notion of "integration as a two-way street" has not prevailed in America's public schools, many black children have been unable to make bridges from their own African-American world to the Euro-American culture that dominates in the educational materials used in most public (and private) schools. Too often, many teachers in these schools have made the same mistake that Christian missionaries make. They try to inculcate alien thought and values into indigenous culture without taking into consideration the significance of indigenous values for determining how the indigenous person views the world and copes with it. Needless to say, the one-way integration method in American public schools has failed to educate African-American children properly.
It has also failed to equip teachers with knowledge of what belle hooks in her book From Margin to Center calls "cultural codes." This is knowledge of those patterns in a particular culture that cause people of the culture to think and act as they do. Lack of this knowledge causes many American teachers to demonstrate great insensitivity to the educational needs of children who are not white and not middle class.
The reactions of some black mothers to the insensitivity of some white teachers demonstrates the frustrating effect this skewed, one-way "integration" method in American education has had upon the mothers and their children. On October 27, 1985, The New York Times Magazine published an article by a middle-class black mother protesting about a play performed by the students at the predominantly white "integrated" school her child attended. All the black children played the part of monkeys and wore no masks. A white child was cast as a gorilla and wore a mask.
This kind of casting revealed not only the insensitivity of the white teachers responsible for the play. It also revealed that racist and stereotypical thinking was part of the intellectual processes of those teachers attempting to educate black children in what was supposed to be an integrated school system. In the folklore of American racism, the connection of black people with apes, monkeys, and gorillas has been made for many years.
I, as a black mother, have been confronted with the task of showing my female child how to deal with her white drama teacher's way of excluding her and the other black children from participation in a school play because "there were no black parts in the play." The play was Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This kind of discouragement of children can lead them to begin to doubt their ability to achieve, foster low self-esteem among black children, and lead them to give up interest in developing their own creative potential.
Black women's historic interest and participation in the education of their children have been greatly affected by the kind of alienation between the student's home and school that has accompanied the so-called integrated school. Post-1960s school officials (teachers and principals) do not visit homes to get to know something about the parents, neighborhood, home environment, and culture from which the child comes. Rather, school officials—often coming from a social and cultural location different from black children—have depended upon parent-teacher meetings at the school to provide the introduction to the child's home, neighborhood, and cultural environment.
Of course, this kind of introduction can only be superficial. The lack of meaningful contact between home and school often results in alienation obvious in the kind of acting-out done by some students in public schools.
Enter the Picture of Economies
THE SECOND AREA of concern of black women directly affects their quality of life and that of their families. Getting and holding jobs that pay adequate wages has been a continuous struggle for both black women and black men.
Because of strong anti-black attitudes in America and because of the capitalistic structure of economics in the society, black women (and black men) have been the economic base upon which many other groups develop sound economies for themselves. This has especially been the case for immigrant groups that have come to America, initially opened businesses in the black community, gotten wealthy, given nothing back to the black community, and then moved beyond the black community to be integrated, as a group, into the mainline American economy.
Many Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrant groups followed this pattern of economic development in the United States. Because black people, since slavery, were identified as the economic foundation upon which others in the society were to build, black people as a group have lagged behind in economic development. A few individual black women and men have managed to amass the financial resources to provide a positive and productive quality of life for themselves and their families—to get the jobs or obtain the financial backing from banks for businesses that are denied to the masses of black people.
It is not overstatement to claim that the most segregated and racially discriminating area of American life is the economic sector—including in that sector the unemployment, business, and financial veins controlling the flow of society's wealth. True enough, a few black women and men have been integrated into this flow. But very, very few are in the high-level decision-making areas that determine the route of the flow of wealth.
Black people, as a whole, still are largely confined to the employment area at very low levels. That is, they mostly work for someone else and are paid the lowest wage possible for some of the hardest, "back-breaking" work. Inasmuch as technology has eaten up many menial jobs, large numbers of black men and women are without employment.
So, it is more than ludicrous to use the term "integration" when referring to black women's and black men's relation to economic life and resources in America. It is just as absurd to suggest that great differences exist between black women's and black men's experience in the employment, business, and financial sectors of American economic life, even though black women's advancement in all areas is affected by sexism.
For example, one day's scanning of the media industry on the East Coast reveals the absurdity of black female-black male distinctions with regard to advancement in the industry. Television provides a few black news commentators—a few more black women than black men because "women are in" due to the feminist movement in this country. But no black national news anchors appear on a daily basis.
Besides the reruns of The Cosby Show and a new integrated soap opera called Generations, there are precious few black people on daytime television. Prime time is even worse. White newspapers seldom present black life as more than black crime.
There are, then, a handful of black women and black men employed in the East Coast media. But in terms of all economic life in America—employment, business, and finance—it is as if the national intentionality is for black people to be thoroughly grounded in belief in the merits of individualism. Therefore, the pattern of "integration" has been to allow a select few black men and women to reap some of the financial benefits of an American capitalist economy. In effect, this amounts to dangling a "goody" just beyond the reach of the masses of black people who themselves have been conditioned to believe that each and every one of them can, with more effort, grab the goody.
Reality, however, attests to something far different. Black people, as a whole, are not allowed full participation in the country's economic life.
Feminism and the Trickle-Down Effect
A THIRD AREA of black women's concern has been the relations between themselves and black men. The contemporary feminist movement has been given press and media exposure that has introduced to all groups the subject of the character and quality of female-male relations.
The African-American community, in its educated and middle-class sectors, has responded to this introduction. In the last five years or so, much more attention has been given to the problems, issues, and contributions of black women. Black female writers such as Alice Walker (The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar) and Toni Morrison (Sula and Beloved) have kept black women's issues before the community. To my knowledge, however, no black female writer has considered the issue of black women and integration. My suspicion is that black women writers do not address this issue because there has been no serious integration of black women as a group into society or into the white feminist community.
But the feminist movement, which has been mostly a freedom movement of white middle-class women, has provided useful categories for assessing the quality of relationships between black women and black men. When feminist thinkers lifted up patriarchy as a structure of domination in women's lives, they provided an instrument by which black women and other women of color in America could begin to name and analyze the nature of the particular oppression they felt in their relationships to men and to the male-dominated societies in which they live.
Yet it must be admitted that feminism in America has remained basically a white phenomenon. The advantages the movement has obtained for women have mostly gone to white women. Therefore, in line with most white freedom movements in America (for example, the labor union movement), feminism has done its share in maintaining white supremacy rather than causing real integration to occur between black women and white women, between black people and white people.
Finally, what must be said about black women and integration in America is that integration has never occurred for them as a group. Therefore, it is impossible to address, in any honest way, the effects of integration upon black women as a whole. To address the issues of the few, individual, professional black women working and living among masses of middle- and upper-class whites is to mistake tokenism for real integration of black and white people.
Perhaps it is enough to say that integration is an American myth about social organization that has never been anywhere near realization. Black people, female and male, are right to question the value of the persistence of the myth in American consciousness, black and white.
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