17th Annual AERA Brown Lecture in Education Research: The Segregation Pandemic: Brown as Treatment or Placebo?

The Brown decision represents a watershed moment in U.S. history as the remedy served as a guiding light during a pandemic. A pandemic is an epidemic taking place on a scale that spans the globe. A circumstance is not a pandemic merely because it exists in different regions of the world or results in the death of many people; it must also be infectious. For centuries, by way of mutually reinforcing regimes consisting of politicians, intellectuals, religious supporters, business leaders, and others, an ideology of racial biology “infected” the world, causing a disease to spread in global fashion. The disease fed on a rhetoric that assigned biological superiority to certain races. A resulting pandemic of segregation occurred. In the United States, the Brown decision offered hope as a therapeutic. This lecture examines Brown through the lens of a medical model while exploring its various pervasive effects on society and education.