Corey Robin's new essay offers thoughtful insight into the new irony of integration: our students are being taught integration and anti-racism values far more than prior generations ever were, but they are also experiencing far less integration in their schools than prior generations (post 1960 generations).  Robin writes:

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respects more segregated now than they were in the 1970s. In 1972, under Richard Nixon, 36 percent of black students in the South attended white-majority schools. By 2011, under Barack Obama, that number had plummeted to 23 percent. In every region of the country, a higher percentage of black students go to nearly all-minority schools than was the case in 1988. The same is true of Latino students in the South, the West and the Midwest.

Robin labels this the "white privilege con," whereby elites can have “conversations” about race while, at the same time, resegregating schools.  This notion also permeates Osamudia James' new article, White Like Me: The Negative Impact of Diversity Rationale on White Identity Formation, 89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 425 (2014).  

All this reminds me of my recent visit to one of the more privileged public high schools in South Carolina.  I was asked to come spend the better part of two hours with a small group of seniors and facilitate a discussion about our state's school funding case.  The first hour was filled with the students' thoughtful ideas, solutions and comments about the inequities in our public schools.  They also recognized how demographically different our poorest schools are.  I was honestly extremely impressed with these students.  At one point, I told them "you are offering a powerful counterpoint to almost everything Washington, D.C. is doing in education today."  I think everyone in the room was enjoying the experience, but I finally asked the group, which did not have a minority student in it, whether they suffered any disadvantage in their own school, whether there was anything that would make their school environment better.  I hid the ball for some time before pointedly asking: "doesn't it strike you as odd that we have sit here having a conversation about how to fix the education in schools about which none of us really know anything, about student of whom we know so little?"