“We Didn't See Color”: The Salience of Color Blindness in Desegregated Schools

During this 50th anniversary year of the Supreme Court's landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education ¹ we continue to consider the lessons learned from school desegregation policy. In trying to answer these questions, most researchers have focused on student outcomes as a result of desegregation, especially the test scores of students in racially segregated versus desegregated schools (see Crain, 1976; Levin, 1975; Orfield, 1978). Another, smaller body of research has examined so-called intergroup relations within racially mixed schools—namely, how students of different racial or ethnic backgrounds “got along” and how their school experiences shaped their racial attitudes (see Schofield, 1991, for a review). And finally, there is an even smaller body of work on the long-term effects of desegregation on African American graduates in terms of their aspirations, their college-going rates, and where they live and work as adults (see Wells & Crain, 1994, for a review). Yet very little research has looked directly at how students in desegregated schools learned about race per se and how these lessons on race influenced their understandings of race as adults.