Free Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Tatum Page B

played out in my lifetime. As the current president of a great institution of higher education who has spent a lot of time working with and studying the work of K–12 educators, I see important and overlooked connections between what happens in schools and what happens in colleges and universities. I want to end the book with some thoughts on what this historical moment means for higher education.
    First, I must point out that the affirmative action era that opened the doors of historically White public and private universities in the early 1970s changed higher education significantly. For example, a sample of twenty-five selective public and private universities whose Black enrollments averaged 1.0 percent or less in 1951 had increased their share of Black undergraduates to approximately 7.0 percent by 1998. 5 One might argue whether that pace of growth in a forty-seven year period is equivalent to “all deliberate speed,” but certainly it is change.
    However, the retreat from school desegregation that is occurring at the K–12 level is certainly also a threat to higher education. It is a threat because both White students and students of color will come to college without the preparation that they need. Many students of color will have had reduced access to high-level college preparatory courses and the facilities that support such a curriculum. Many White students will have had less effective social preparation for diverse campus life. Further, the current legal assault on affirmative action in higher education can be seen as parallel to the resegregation of public education effected through the Supreme Court. Just as one legal case after another chipped away at the possibility of full implementation of the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision for public elementary and secondary schools, the anti–affirmative action cases directed toward higher education threaten to further the restrictions that have already been placed on special recruiting efforts and other affirmative action initiatives designed to increase the enrollment of students of color at predominantly White institutions.
    Yet those of us who were the beneficiaries of
Brown
, both White and of color, and who came of age before the retrenchment of the 1990s, are now in positions of influence. We can use our spheres of influence to interrupt this backward movement. Those of us in higher education have a particular obligation to do so. The decision makers of the future are the college students of today. They need to have an understanding of the social history that has shaped their current context of racial isolation, and the choices they can make to change it.
    Because of the persistence of elementary- and secondary-school segregation fifty years after the
Brown
decision, today’s American youth have had few opportunities to interact with those racially, ethnically, or religiously different from them before they go to college. In a recent conversation I had with a White male colleague who lives and works in a largely White community, he lamented that his son had no Black friends, and to his dismay, his son was expressing some negative attitudes toward the African American students he did encounter. My colleague, also in his fifties, was like me a child of
Brown
who had been able to develop close cross-racial friendships in school, and he was worried that his son would not benefit from such an experience himself. His son’s story illustrates well the fact that lack of direct experience means that what one learns about the “other” is too often secondhand information, conveyed in the form of media stereotypes. Even when parents have positive racial attitudes, children can absorb the prejudices of their peers and the wider cultural milieu. The specific content of those prejudices, and their targets, will vary depending on where students have grown up and what their life experience has been. But we can be sure that all members of our campus population have