Becoming Integrated

“To my mind now, integration narratives erase native communities by design. It’s necessary to think separate and unequal also meant shabby or lacking. The more lack, the greater the achievement, the greater the moral self-congratulation for achieving integrated space. Also, the easier it becomes to forget how recently black people were denied equal access to housing and loans, and to forget the systematic removal, and eventual estrangement, of the communities those people managed to make anyway. The trajectory of that narrative may benefit a few “exceptional” black people. It does not, however, create the space for exceptional acts to become the norm. A narrative constructed as such troubles me for what effect it might imprint on generations of black people, what hazards it might mean for their ability to regard one another tenderly. One winces at the pressure the historical narrative exerts, the compliance it demands, that everyone play nice and cooperate with the shape of stories regarding integration out of a sense of mission, that saying otherwise would be enacting a betrayal against the efforts of civil rights activists. But while surveying the recent literature by and about the Nine, I found myself in conversation with them, putting forth this lament, one I shudder to say even now, given what they faced then, but that nags at my mouth, wanting to be said aloud: What exactly did your sacrifice leave us? What did it cost? “

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-98-fall-2017/becoming-integrated