Education

Education

Multicultural Perspectives, 5(4), 22-25 Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Black, White, and Us: The Meaning of Brown v. Board of Education for Latinos
Sonia Nieto
University of Massachusetts

May 17, 1954, the day that the Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas decision was hatided down, was a watershed event not only in educational history but in U.S. history as well. It also helped to seal the Black-White paradigm into the popular consciousness, a paradigm that even today remains fixed in the minds of Americans. In most current accounts of Brown, for example, segregation, integration, desegregation, and resegregation are still largely framed in terms of African Americans and Whites. The history of segregation and challenges to it has been a more complicated and diverse one, but this history has gotten lost somewhere along the way. In what follows, I discuss the meaning of Brown for Latinos. In so doing, I also want to suggest that the Black-White binary is not only incorrect but that it helps to obscure the common struggles of African Americans, Latinos, and others for equal education. However, it is not my purpose to propose yet another rigid paradigm (i.e., Black, White, and Latino) or to further make invisible the experiences of Native Americans, Asians, Arabs, Haitians, Cape Verdeans, East Indians, Europeans, or the many other groups that make up our nation. Rather, my purpose is to open up the conversation by briefly explaining how we Latinos have been left out of the story—while at the same time acknowledging that many others have been left out as well. It is my contention that the nature of the conversation concerning segregation, integration, and equal education would differ depending on the particular sociopolitical context and history of each group and that all groups would benefit by participating in and contributing to this conversation. There are many fine historians who have written the largely unacknowledged...