Talk: School integration tough

In spite of all of the perceived advances since the civil rights movement, Edgar Epps, a retired professor from the University of Chicago, told an audience of about 60 people last Thursday that schools are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago. Epps, a well-known scholar of race relations, lectured in Stiteler Hall about the stifled nature of desegregation in American schools in the second annual Constance E. Clayton Lecture, entitled "Race and School Desegregation: Contemporary Legal and Educational Issues." Decades after the civil rights movement, the country still suffers from the inability to integrate its citizens in schools, both rural and urban, Epps said. He also discussed the large gap between what integration means for white parents and what it means for black parents. "For white parents, integration in school means 10 to 20 percent of the student body is black," Epps said. "When the percentage is higher, these parents get scared. Meanwhile, for black parents, they view integration in schools as a 50 to 60 percent white student population." Epps emphasized the fact that the U.S. is still divided. "If you believe we are a color-blind nation and if you are not white, you are in for a rude awakening," he said. The very nature of desegregation encourages tolerance among races and the capacity to work together, Epps said. But as a utopian concept, he said, desegregation is too quickly hampered through a phenomenon referred to as "white flight." In other words, white members of a neighborhood relocate when there is an increase of black students in the school systems. "The resources in the resource-rich districts get richer while the resources in the resource-poor districts get poorer," Epps said, explaining that this only further contributes to segregation in education. "They relocate to higher socioeconomic-class neighborhoods." Epps believes that change in white flight can only occur under complete economic restructuring. This, he said, would allow the underprivileged to have their say and maintain equality among all students. But Epps admits that such a theory is impossible and he holds little optimism for the future of desegregation in schools other than placing the ability to create change in the hands of the youth. Afterward, students in attendance said they were impressed with Epps' knowledge and dedication to the subject. Claudine Watson, an Education graduate student, said the lecture was "incredibly relevant to the activities of desegregation in Philadelphia schools today." Epps thanked several professors at Penn for their work in expanding the minds of students and making a difference. He said he is certain that the young people of the world can overcome the ignorance before them and look beyond racial differences in the effort to advance as a tolerant nation in which race plays no role in education.