The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism by Joseph Darda

Author:Joseph Darda
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legal scholars have raised doubts as to whether the Warren court relied on social science in deciding Brown v. Board, suggesting that it, foreseeing a “crisis of institutional legitimacy,” might have included footnote 11 as a kind of fallback defense.93 Some contend that Cold War self-interest, not half-baked social science, drove the decision. But a closer look at the narrative structure of the social science—of the white child as the embodiment of an innocent national future, maturing one stage at a time—reveals how it ordered the white self-interest and gradualism of that Cold War nationalism. Public education, Warren wrote in the Brown decision, “is the very foundation of good citizenship” and a “principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment.” Barring Black children, on whose behalf the NAACP had filed the class action suit, from a good education would “affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”94 But it would also, the decision and Warren’s comments from the time suggest, stunt the moral growth of the white national child.

The chief justice and his clerks did not look far for the sources they cited in footnote 11. All seven received mention in the social science statement “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation,” which the NAACP counsel submitted to the court with their briefs. Thirty-two social scientists signed the statement, including Allport, Isidor Chein, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and two of Adorno’s coauthors of The Authoritarian Personality, Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford. Robert Carter, Thurgood Marshall, and Spottswood Robinson of the NAACP introduced it as a “consensus of social scientists.” The authors determined, reciting the findings of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, that segregation damaged the “personality of all children—the children of the majority group in a somewhat different way than the more obviously damaged children of the minority group.” The more subtle white damage, they wrote, manifested in “guilty feelings,” the “acquisition of an unrealistic basis for self-evaluation,” and “unrealistic fears and hatreds.”95

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund found the social scientists’ argument so convincing that it led with it in submitting Brown to the Vinson court in 1951, stating that “it is an integrated, intelligent and open-minded personality that can best benefit from education at any level” and that because “the educational process is cumulative in nature, a person’s ‘knowledge’ or ‘education’ can never be separated from the total personality.”96 The LDF encouraged the justices to see the case as a matter of what kind of mind—integrated or disorganized? tolerant or bigoted?—they wanted for their children and for the nation as the Truman administration sent more soldiers and marines into combat in Korea. That framing worried John Davis, counsel for the South Carolina school district, enough that he tried to counter it with a clever, massaged reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 argument that a good segregated school would serve the “rounded personality” better than a bad integrated education.

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