Today (May 17th, 2024) is the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
As a #Topeka native, my father was amongst the first cohort to enter into desegregated schools. So, while I didn’t know it growing up, his lived experience influenced me in ways that today quite likely I will not know in this lifetime.
With my father transcending in 2017, my next source is my mother who also lived in Kansas City but went to integrated schools before Brown v. Topeka.
While she had an equal influence, it was from a perspective of having a mother who was hyper-vigilant about people racializing her kids. My maternal grandma pretty much stood between any conscious or uncosncious motivation to infiltrate her children’s mind with the virus of racism. She did so even when my mother went to college.
In college my mother’s dorm room was the handout for the coeds in her dorm. The ladies spent considerable time together. And while interracial roommates were not yet socially accepted in 1959 at Kansas’ state universities, hanging out in a room had no socio-institutional barriers.
My mother and her dorm mates became lifelong friends and eventually interracial roommates nearly 6-7 years after Brown.
Some of the most critical psychological research of the 20th century.
It’s called intergroup contact theory–originally contact hypothesis.
It says that prejudice is reduced when groups intentionally come together across their differences under four conditions:
1. Equal status (per humanity);
2. Common goals;
3. Cooperation and Connection over a significant period of time; and,
4. Support of Authorities and Institutions.
The doctrine of separate but equal was unanimously struck down by the SCOTUS, with this research along with 100s of psychologists declaring that segregation harms all children, without regard to race.
I think my mother and her friends are a brilliant case study in supporting what I refer to as,
‘Contact > Caucus’ (i.e., be in meaningful contact across differences and similarities (visible and invisible) with common goals in co-creation.
#Brown1954 #inclusion #equity #diversity
