Cultural Separation

Abstract

In this chapter I focus my attention on the North American context and examine voluntary separation (VS) with a cultural base for stigmatized and poor blacks in the inner city. As we saw in Chapter 2, it has long been an orthodoxy that the answer to urban segregation is to integrate schools. Yet for some time now, many African Americans have questioned the aims of integration—“diversity” and “multiculturalism,” in twenty-first-century vernacular—claiming them to be little more than attempts to assuage liberal guilt and maintain white cultural and economic dominance. Indeed, given the grim realities of black community life in a number of American cities, many African Americans believe most educational reforms to be either woefully inadequate or misguided. In various urban neighborhoods, teenage pregnancy and crime rates among black youth remain at worrisome levels, unemployment remains scandalously high, many children grow up in schools and neighborhoods overrun by gangs and drug trafficking, and more African American fathers are incarcerated than graduate from high school.¹