Resegregated Schools, Racial Attitudes, and Long-Run Partisanship: Evidence for White Backlash

Brown v. Board (1954) catalyzed a nationwide effort by the federal judiciary to desegregate public schools by court order, representing a major achievement for the U.S. civil rights movement. Four decades later, courts began dismissing schools from desegregation decrees in a staggered fashion, causing their racial homogeneity to rise. I leverage this exogenous source of variation in the racial mix of schools released from court orders between 1990 and 2014 to explore two key aspects of how whites react to attending schools with students of color. First, contemporaneous survey data indicate that as schools re-segregated, white students in these schools expressed more favorable attitudes towards black and Latino students. Second, present-day voter records from six Southern states of white students in schools that re-segregated show that they are significantly more likely to identify with the more racially liberal party – the Democrats – today. The findings are consistent with white students experiencing resegregation as a reduction in social threat, and indicate that school desegregation efforts may have caused life-long shifts among white students toward racial and political conservatism. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional, catalyzing battles nationwide over integrating schools along racial and ethnic lines. Brown v. Board instigated a series of subsequent decrees ordered by lower courts that integrated schools and subjected them to continuous court monitoring. Current evidence suggests that school desegregation efforts have led to a reduction in high school dropout rates, increases in occupational attainment and adult earnings, and higher test scores for black students (Guryan, 2004; Hanushek, Kain and Rivkin, 2009; Johnson, 2011). Public opinion data also indicate that a majority of parents of all races want their children to attend racially diverse schools (Frankenberg and Jacobsen, 2011). Although the positive long-term consequences of school desegregation among black students are well studied, there are few studies on the long-term consequences of changing the racial makeup of schools among white students. A substantial body of work examines the effects of racial diversity in adulthood on whites, but we know less about how white Americans’ exposure to different racial environments in school affects their long-term political behavior, especially their partisanship. Addressing this gap in our knowledge can deepen our understanding of the full consequences of school segregation and desegregation, as well as help us better understand underpinnings of contemporary partisan identification. There are reasons to think the effects of school racial diversity on white partisanship later in life might be significant: evidence suggests that experiences in adolescence shape how whites feel about racial minorities (Bigler, Jones and Lobliner, 1997), and we know that racial attitudes are strongly associated with partisanship (Tesler, 2012a; Kinder and DaleRiddle, 2012). However, the direction of the relationship between exposure to racial diversity