Merry argues that most voluntary separation experiments in education are not driven by a sense of racial, cultural or religious superiority. Rather, they are driven among other things by a desire for quality education, not to mention community membership and self respect.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is arguably the most historically important clause of the most significant part of the US Constitution. Designed to be a central guarantor of civil rights and civil liberties following Reconstruction, this clause could have been at the center of most of the country's constitutional controversies, not only during Reconstruction, but in the modern period as well; yet for a variety of historical reasons, including precedent-setting narrow interpretations, the Privileges or Immunities Clause has been cast aside by the Supreme Court. This book investigates the Clause in a textualist-originalist manner, an approach increasingly popular among both academics and judges, to examine the meanings actually expressed by the text in its original context. Arguing for a revival of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, author Christopher Green lays the groundwork for assessing the originalist credentials of such areas of law as school segregation, state action, sex discrimination, incorporation of the Bill of Rights against states, the relationship between tradition and policy analysis in assessing fundamental rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment rights of corporations and aliens. Thoroughly argued and historically well-researched, this book demonstrates that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects liberty and equality, and it will be of interest to legal academics, American legal historians, and anyone interested in American constitutional history.

In the United States, it is quite common to lay claim to the benefits of society by appealing to "taxpayer citizenship--the idea that, as taxpayers, we deserve access to certain social services like a public education. Tracing the genealogy of this concept, Camille Walsh shows how tax policy and taxpayer identity were built on the foundations of white supremacy and intertwined with ideas of whiteness. From the origins of unequal public school funding after the Civil War through school desegregation cases from Brown v. Board of Education to San Antonio v. Rodriguez in the 1970s, this study spans over a century of racial injustice, dramatic courtroom clashes, and white supremacist backlash to collective justice claims. Incorporating letters from everyday individuals as well as the private notes of Supreme Court justices as they deliberated, Walsh reveals how the idea of a "taxpayer" identity contributed to the contemporary crises of public education, racial disparity, and income inequality.

A historical overview of Mexican Americans' social and economic experiences in Texas For hundreds of years, Mexican Americans in Texas have fought against political oppression and exclusion—in courtrooms, in schools, at the ballot box, and beyond. Through a detailed exploration of this long battle for equality, this book illuminates critical moments of both struggle and triumph in the Mexican American experience. Martha Menchaca begins with the Spanish settlement of Texas, exploring how Mexican Americans’ racial heritage limited their incorporation into society after the territory’s annexation. She then illustrates their political struggles in the nineteenth century as they tried to assert their legal rights of citizenship and retain possession of their land, and goes on to explore their fight, in the twentieth century, against educational segregation, jury exclusion, and housing covenants. It was only in 1967, she shows, that the collective pressure placed on the state government by Mexican American and African American activists led to the beginning of desegregation. Menchaca concludes with a look at the crucial roles that Mexican Americans have played in national politics, education, philanthropy, and culture, while acknowledging the important work remaining to be done in the struggle for equality.

"This book examines a century of segregation in the California town of Oxnard. It focuses on designs for education that reproduced inequity as a routine matter. For Oxnard's white elite there was never a question of whether to segregate Mexicans, and later Blacks, but how to do so effectively and permanently. David G. García explores what the author calls mundane racism--the systematic subordination of minorities enacted as a commonplace way of conducting business within and beyond schools."--Provided by publisher.

Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965

Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial equality to the forefront of the nation’s attention. Beyond its repercussions for the educational system, the decision also heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national identity. “Brown v. Board” and the Transformation of American Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision. Through the lens of three cultural “first responders,” Ben Keppel tracks the creation of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning studies of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country, helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black. Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle, family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support. Together, the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal decision.

Merry argues that most voluntary separation experiments in education are not driven by a sense of racial, cultural or religious superiority. Rather, they are driven among other things by a desire for quality education, not to mention community membership and self respect.

An industrial city on the outskirts of Stockholm, Södertälje is the global capital of the Syriac Orthodox Christian diaspora, an ethnic and religious minority group fleeing persecution and discrimination in the Middle East. Since the 1960s, this Syriac community has transformed the standardized welfare state spaces of the city’s neighborhoods into its own “Mesopotälje,” defined by houses with Mediterranean and other international influences, a major soccer stadium, and massive churches and social clubs. Such projects have challenged principles of Swedish utopian architecture and planning that explicitly emphasized the erasure of difference. In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have altered the city’s built environment “from below,” offering a fresh perspective on segregation in the European modernist suburbs. Combining architectural, urban, and ethnographic tools through archival research, site work, participant observation (among residents, designers, and planners), and interviews, Mack provides a unique take on urban development, social change, and the immigrant experience in Europe over a fifty-year period. Her book shows how the transformation of space at the urban scale—the creation and evolution of commercial and social districts, for example—operates through the slow accumulation of architectural projects. As Mack demonstrates, these developments are not merely the result of the grassroots social practices usually attributed to immigrants but instead are officially approved through dialogues between residents and design professionals: accredited architects, urban planners, and civic bureaucrats. Mack attends to the tensions between the “enclavization” practices of a historically persecuted minority group, the integration policies of the Swedish welfare state and its planners, and European nativism.

The study of USA's on-going failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows how, from the Revolution through to the Civil War, white American anti-slavery reformers failed to forge a colour-blind society.