Living with and Learning about Racial Segregation
by Rebecca S. Bigler
November 2021
I moved from an all-White school in Wisconsin in 5th grade to a predominately Black and White school in Illinois in 6th grade. The experience profoundly influenced me. It shaped many aspects of my personal and professional life, including my decision to become a psychologist who studies racial attitudes and behavior.
Schools are highly complex environments. Psychological scientists have yet to fully catalog and adequately describe the meaningful components of school racial climate. The challenge of understanding the role of school racial environment in children's lives is daunting because, in addition to cataloging the relevant components, it requires explaining the processes by which children understand the race-related information that they encounter, a process sometimes called "racial learning." Additional complexity arises from change over time in school environments and the children within them.
The challenge of understanding school climates can be illustrated by considering an already extensively-studied component of school racial climate: racial integration versus segregation. Psychologists have argued for approximately 70 years that the degree to which schools' student bodies are all the same race versus racially diverse affects youths' racial attitudes. However, most research and theory studying school integration/segregation are, I argue, woefully simplistic and, as a result, fail to fully and accurately capture the processes by which racial integration/segregation shapes children's racial learning, attitudes, and behavior.
One neglected issue is that schools (regardless of their degree of integration/ segregation) are located in neighborhoods and cities that are also vary in their level of diversity. Most psychologists assess only the relative proportion of individuals of various racial/ethnic backgrounds within a particular school. Thus, a child might be reported, for example, as attending a more (or less) integrated school. However, children's experience of their school environment is likely to be affected by their knowledge of, and experience with, the racial make-up of schools across (a) their school district, (b) geographic regions within their city (e.g. districts within the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area), (c) cities within their state (e.g., rural vs. urban cities in Illinois), (d) states within their country (e.g., Vermont vs. New York), and (d) across countries (e.g., US vs. Nigeria). For example, the consequences of attending a school with students of all the same race may vary as a function of the degree of racial proportions within the wider community. Unfortunately, researchers know little about (a) how children understand and experience racial variations in populations across schools, neighborhoods, cities, and states within the US or across the globe (b) how such knowledge and experience change over time, or (c) how such knowledge and experience affect children's racial attitudes and behavior.
Another neglected issue is the degree of racial integration/segregation across locations and time within particular schools. Regardless of the level of diversity of the school at large, students self-segregate within school, in the classrooms, cafeterias, playgrounds, athletic teams, music-related groups (e.g., band, choir), school organizations, etc. For example, while visiting an ethnically mixed middle school in Texas, I observed a very high level of racial segregation during lunch periods: Latinx children disproportionately ate their school-prepared lunches in the school cafeteria, whereas White children disproportionately ate their homemade lunches in the school outdoor atrium. Researchers know little about how children understand and experience variations in racial segregation that characterize spaces within their schools and how children's understanding and experience of those patterns changes over time.
Importantly, even when children go to diverse schools, there are differences in how much they interact in integrated compared to segregated spaces. Children often (but not always) play an active role in selecting the peers that make up their classroom working groups, the school activities and organizations that they join, the peers with whom they interact on the playground, the locations of their seats within classrooms and auditoriums, etc. By doing so, children help create lives for themselves that are more or less racially integrated. Furthermore, I expect most children within racially mixed schools readily learn that some children (but not others) prefer same-race peers and same-race settings and can identify these peers. The causes and consequences of these individual differences are poorly understood. Yet, as was true of my life, the amount of time people spend in racially integrated versus segregated school settings is likely to have continued impact on their lives and the societies they live in.
