This essay is a response to Angela Harris' "Racing Law: Legal Scholarship and the Critical Race Revolution." It further explores what Harris calls the "grammars of governance" from a historical case-law perspective and from the structure of our contemporary educational organization. First, a little-known case involving violence…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

More progress is needed to achieve equity in racial and gender representation in the push to diversify the physical sciences. In order to continue moving towards representation and equity, there is a need for more analytic tools that can help us understand where we are and how we got here. This may also enable meaningful systemic change. In this…

The advent of critical race theory (CRT) in legal scholarship changed the way in which legal scholars think about race and racism in at least three ways. First, CRT scholars argue that the problem of racial justice is fundamental to American law, whereas the previous generation of civil rights scholars saw racial justice as a problem of…

This conceptual analysis centers two historical periods in which Black communities in the United States secured educational rights for themselves in spite of (not because of) intervention from the federal government. Drawing from the Critical Race Theory, the authors argue that Reconstruction and the post-"Brown" era offer valuable…

Scholars have long promoted black history as an appropriate space to promote the development of racial literacy. Few research studies, however, have examined how teacher education uses black history as a heuristic to teach about race. Using racial literacy as a framework, this article examined the varied ways four social studies pre-service…

The long-standing effort to desegregate schools in the United States has been fostered, in part, by the development of magnet schools, which were launched in the 1960s to offer appealing choices of educational programs that could attract an integrated population of families. Magnet schools are public elementary or secondary schools that seek to…

The purpose of this case study was to examine how Mississippi Valley State University (MVSU) implemented the negotiated ruling of the "Ayers" desegregation lawsuit and settlement to empower the institution and similarly situated historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The spoken and written words of three administrators of…

This article examines the historical relationship between political power and the pursuit of education and social equality from the Reconstruction era to the present. The chief argument is that education equality is historically linked to and even predicated on equal political power, specifically, equal access to the franchise and instruments of…

This article provides historical and legal context for recent U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decisions. The Supreme Court's race-based and race-neutral arguments from "Brown" (1954) to "Parents Involved" (2007) are examined within their broader context. Policy implications and potential support for diversity goal…

After the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the University of Michigan admission cases, which struck down racial preferences and quotas in Michigan's undergraduate and law school admission, several groups have challenged race-conscious admission, school placement policies and academic support programs. Even the federal government has challenged…

This article explores the legacies of the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" Supreme Court decision within the historical context of race relations in the United States. The pursuit by African Americans to exercise their rights of citizenship is described as influenced by the changing face of fear. The Supreme Court decisions that…

"The Journal of Negro Education" was born during the third decade of the 20th century. "The Journal" has reflected concern with race and racial discrimination as a central problem in the education of Negro people. During its 75th anniversary, the legacy of "The Journal" continues and has remained the educational,…

The visionary social struggle that resulted in the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision did not take into account the ways ideologically distorted knowledge sustains societal injustice, particularly academic and school knowledge about black history and culture. This delimited vision of equal justice raises a number of questions of…