ABSTRACT
This chapter examines one of the dominant analytic constructs in studies of U.S. racial politics in the post-World War II era: the assertion that public debates over race and racism are best understood as a conflict between the enduring ideologies of “racial liberalism” and “racial conservatism.”1 In these frameworks, “racial conservatism” implies an endorsement of racial inequality and an aversion to anti-discrimination remedies which undermine “white rights.” Racial liberalism, on the other hand, rejects ascriptive hierarchies, and embraces the norms of “equal opportunity” and a “level playing field.” I explore the uses and limitations of these frameworks through an examination of two statewide California ballot initiatives over school desegregation and busing in the 1970s. I highlight the processes and practices by which competing political actors seek to articulate frameworks of meaning in order to naturalize and thereby justify particular policy solutions. This approach regards ideological formation as a contingent and localized process, in which specific political practices and institutional arrangements interact with the broader historical norms and themes usually labeled as “ideology.” I utilize this framework to investigate how California’s deeply separate and unequal system of public education was defended and renewed through a discursive framework that incorporated, rather than rejected, the leading tenets of racial liberalism.2
