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The Many Facets of Brown: Integration in a Multiracial Society
Scott Kurashige
No state in the union, not even the most unreconstructed southern one, faces the enormous and complicated racial problem California will have for some time. The South mainly just has Negroes and antebellum whites. California has Negroes, whites, Japanese, Mexicans and Chinese, all of whom must learn to live together, or the whole shebang might as well be chucked on a KKK bonfire.
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| —Editorial, Los Angeles Tribune, June 1, 1946 |
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| In writing the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Earl Warren was very conscious of constructing, not just a legal document, but a paradigm-shifting political statement. Against the entrenched customs, practices, and hierarchies of white supremacist rule, the Brown decision established liberal universalism as the guiding concept governing American race relations. Warren's own career, however, was marked by contradictory, rather than universal, stances on racialized political issues. On the one hand, the Brown decision, as Warren later wrote, manifested the belief held by Warren and countless millions of others that the fight against fascism had transformed humanity by creating an unprecedented unity in defense of "equal rights for all." On the other hand, Warren's articulation of the lessons of World War II promoted a false universalism, for he conveniently glossed over his own demagogic actions as California attorney general and governor during the war. In the months following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Warren had argued that ordinary Japanese American farmers had "infiltrated themselves" into "strategic" military sites in California; he had even asserted that the absence of sabotage committed by any Japanese American indicated "a studied effort not to have any until the zero hour arrives." While it was in his eyes feasible to distinguish loyal from disloyal members of "the Caucasian race," Warren championed the mass internment of Japanese Americans, whose inscrutable character, he contended, made it impossible for authorities to "form any opinion that we believe to be sound."1 |
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Revisiting Warren's checkered history highlights the need to bring the perspectives of multiple communities of color to the study of racial integration. Ironically, the federal government's wartime detention of Japanese Americans in concentration camps occurred at the very moment when it began taking its greatest steps toward integrating African Americans into mainstream society. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's June 1941 issuance of Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in defense industries was a testament largely to the rising political clout of African Americans as crystallized by A. Philip Randolph's mobilization for a projected national "March on Washington."2 Yet, that milestone achievement in the quest for civil rights did little to stem the virulent tide of attacks against Japanese Americans. A complete history of integration must thus encompass and explain the divergent trajectories of different racialized groups in the United States if we are to avoid the trap of false universalisms. |
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Indeed, the rapid and dramatic transformation of the United States from a majority-white society toward one in which people of color are in the majority must be taken as a challenge to do more than simply add new story lines to a preexisting narrative. Since the mid-twentieth century, racial integration has generally been measured by the degree to which the nation's black "minority" and sometimes other "minorities" have been incorporated into its white "majority." While segregation remains a social problem of immense proportions, steadfast adherents of integration have become less prevalent. Activists and scholars who have criticized assimilation and the construction of whiteness have largely disabused us of idealized notions of integration embraced during the postwar era. The fiftieth anniversary of Brown can thus serve as a call to reckon with the reality that the United States is not a white but a "brown" nation (to borrow a term from Richard Rodriguez).3 It should be an occasion to rethink the entire concept of majority-minority relations and to revitalize the quest for integration as a movement to construct a new polyethnic majority. |
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