The Enduring Legacy

Front matter

Structured Inequality in America’s Public Schools

Mark Ryan

Foreword by Secretary Leon Panetta

Contents

List of Figures | ix

Foreword | xi Preface | xiii Acknowledgments | xvii

Part1: A Historical Analysis | 1

Part 2: The Politics of Structured Inequality from Johnson to Trump

The Cycle of Segregation, Desegregation, and Resegregation | 42 Structured Inequality: From Political Strategy to Pedagogical Practice | 43 Courts and the Persistence of Structured Inequality | 44 The Court and “Race Neutral” Diversity | 47 The Southern Strategy | 49 LBJ: Integrate and Get Funding or Stay Segregated and Get Nothing | 53 viii Contents

Political Ambiguity on Integration | 55

Nixon’s Rise Bolstered by the Southern Strategy | 57 Nixon’s Ambiguity on Integration and the Courts | 59 Ford Continues Nixonian States’ Rights Policies | 62

Jimmy Carter, a Son of the South, Disrupts the Southern Strategy | 63 Reagan Nullifies LBJ’s Integration Legacy via the Southern Strategy | 64 Reagan Reverses Policies against Race Discrimination | 66 Reagan: Busing to Desegregate—Waste of Time and Public Money | 68 George Herbert Walker Bush and an Evolving Southern Strategy | 69 Southern Ticket of Clinton and Gore Wins as

Resegregation Persists | 72 Bill Clinton’s Recognition of Resegregation in the 1990s | 74 George W. Bush Follows Reagan’s Policies as Racial Isolation Builds | 75 Obama Defeats Southern Strategy Even as School

Resegregation Increases | 75 Trump Triumphant and the Spread of the Southern Strategy | 77 From LBJ to Trump: Segregation to Desegregation to Resegregation | 81

Part 3: Pedagogical Plans to Desegregate America’s Classrooms | 89

Desegregation of Public Schools in the Twenty-First Century | 90 The Pedagogic Case for Racial Integration | 96

The Cognitive Benefits of a Diverse Learning Environment | 98 Affective Benefits of a Diverse Learning Environment | 99 Paradox of Segregation and the Negligence of Scholars | 101 Solution Sets to Desegregation in the 2020s | 103

Vital Role of Schools and Colleges of Education | 105

Gender as a Marker of Difference | 107

Culturally Relevant Teaching and Learning | 108

Dual Paradigm of Onsite and Online | 112

Hybrid Model Plus Service Learning | 114

Final Thoughts | 118

Notes | 121 Bibliography | 135 Image Credits | 149 Index | 153

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11645040

FIGURES

Figure 1. Students saying the Pledge of Allegiance at the Weill Public School in San Francisco in 1942. Those of Japanese descent later were sent to relocation centers for the duration of the war. | 1 Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin as depicted in an 1780 engraving. | 5 Figure 3. An 1805 engraving of Thomas Jefferson. | 5

Figure 4. An 1870 view of a layered school system eschewing sectarian bitterness and unfair distribution of funds while favoring the idea of a common school. | 11

Figure 5. Washington, D.C., schoolchildren (1899?) in a horse-drawn bus. | 16

Figure 6. Immigrants in night school (1909) in Boston, Massachusetts. | 17

Figure 7. African American schoolgirls in a cooking class surround a wood stove (c. 1899). | 19

Figure 8. Columbia, the allegorical female figure of the United States, leading pioneers westward as they journey on foot, in a stagecoach, in a Conestoga wagon, and by rail. | 21

Figure 9. Elementary public school students in Washington, D.C. (c. 1899). | 22

Figure 10. President Theodore Roosevelt, 1904. | 25

Figure 11. Uncle Sam as teacher to racially stereotypical new students named “Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii, and Philippines” | 31

Figure 12. Mental aptitude testing, 1943. | 34

Figure 13. School integration in Washington, D.C. (1955). | 41

Figure 14. Civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King meet with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office in 1963. | 44

Figure 15. Ku Klux Klan members support Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, California. | 50

Figure 16. President Nixon, in Washington (1969), throwing out the opening game ball in what was then America’s pastime. | 56

Figure 17. Alabama governor George Wallace, in a doorway at the University of Alabama in 1963 attempting to stop integration. | 58

Figure 18. Children on a school bus, riding from the suburbs to an inner-city school, Charlotte, North Carolina in 1973. | 60 x Figures

Figure 19. President Gerald Ford with George Wallace at a campaign stop in the South in 1976. | 63

Figure 20. Jimmy Carter and Senator Hubert Humphrey at the Democratic National Convention in New York City in 1976. | 65

Figure 21. President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, photo taken between 1981 to 1986. | 66

Figure 22. Senators Bob Dole and Chris Dodd bookend “Speech Report Card” with an A+ for President George H. W. Bush. | 70

Figure 23. Senator Strom Thurmond in 1961. | 71

Figure 24. President William Jefferson Clinton in 1993. | 73 Figure 25. President George W. Bush in 2003. | 76

Figure 26. President Barack Obama in 2009. | 78

Figure 27. President Donald Trump in 2017. | 79

Figure 28. “I have a dream that one day down in Alabama. .. little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers.’—Martin Luther King Jr. | 89

Figure 29. An inclusive educational institution holds the promise of a new type of twenty-first-century school—a place of expanding knowledge that views diversity of language, thought, and culture as a learning opportunity. | 95

Figure 30. The effects of such racially integrated classrooms are multigenerational. | 97

Figure 31. Integrated schools are an obvious remedy to discriminatory attitudes and prejudices born of isolation andignorance. | 100

Figure 32. Integrated schools inherently afford every student access to the cultural competency and world-class education necessary to live, work, and succeed in America’s multicultural tomorrow. | 106

Figure 33. Enlightened schools need to devise strategies to accommodate every student from different parts of the community by providing the kind of enriched educational experience that brings diverse groups of learners together in a working relationship. | 116

Figure 34. The mesh of new innovative ways of learning among diverse students may well contribute to learning by building on a wider range of prior knowledge. By gaining and using new information through their online reading and testing, these diverse students then join in a planned field experience that includes in-person observations, experimentation, and reflections. | 118

Foreword

The Enduring Legacy is a wake-up call for American education to never stop fighting to fulfill the promise that all of our children are entitled to an equal education.

For too long, America’s public education has historically provided dual and disparate opportunities and outcomes for its children. From the eighteenth-century common school to the twenty-first-century public school, there has been a struggle between the enlightened forces of inclusion and a tradition of exclusion within American society.

The historical and political record compels a policy imperative: in order to provide a free public education of the highest quality for every child, the growing reality of renewed school segregation must be rejected. A true democracy recommends it, the art of teaching requires it, and the Constitution demands it. Simply put, public schools have been resegregating for decades. We know what the problem is. But why this problem persists needs examination.

One reason for an increasingly separate and unequal public school system is the negligence of scholars in general and schools and colleges of education in particular to tackle this problem effectively. Those who do not directly oppose segregated schools, and tinker with the racial achievement gap by asking more of students, parents, and teachers stuck in segregated schools, misunderstand the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, uphold the false separate-but-equal remnants of Plessy v. Ferguson, and are oblivious to the work and goals of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Too much blood has been sacrificed in the fight for equal education to simply accept the consequences of resegregation. I know because I was part of that fight as director of the U.S. Office for Civil Rights in the late 1960s.

Although there were a number of brave education officials and leaders who tried to do the right thing and break up the dual school system, the politics of resistance kept raising its ugly head. Thanks to the federal courts and the many dedicated civil rights attorneys and public servants, the struggle to break down racial barriers in education and enforce the requirement of Brown v. Board of Education made significant progress. Many, like myself, lost our jobs in that fight. But the country moved in the right direction because it xii Foreword was right—morally, legally, and educationally. And as Mark Ryan makes clear in this book, it is our job to continue that progress and never retreat from the promise of equal education.

Although no single educational policy can change the legacy of structured inequality in the American public school, a balanced mix of clear policies, programs, and practices based on what has worked in the past, coupled with new technologies of what may be effective in the future, is needed. Teacher education programs are in dire need of curricular change to prepare today’s teacher candidates for the continuing reality of the segregated public school classroom. In particular, these programs must provide new teachers with the awareness, knowledge, and cultural competence to begin to transform public schools from islands of racial isolation to welcoming places of inclusion.

The key to success rests in strong political and educational leadership. There must be a commitment to equal education in the political, judicial, and educational arenas.

A free public education that provides an equal opportunity for all children is more than an American ideal. It is the very foundation of our democracy. Historic cracks in that foundation grow wider each day. That is because our educational system, which routinely hails inclusion, mostly is accepting of exclusion. New approaches and a willingness to pursue fairness for every child by combating segregation is not just a noble cause. It is the professional responsibility of every teacher, principal, superintendent, college professor, and dean. It is the duty of every citizen and elected leader who pledges loyalty to the Constitution. Where inequality exists, it makes all of us less equal. The education of our children and indeed the future of our democracy are at stake.

LEON E. PANETTA

FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE U.S. OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS

Preface

Enduring Legacy describes a multifaceted historical, political, and pedagogical paradox—a constant struggle between those who consistently espouse a message of hope and inclusion and others who systematically plan for the layered hierarchies of exclusion. At the core of this book is the description of structured inequality in the nation’s schools that is deeply connected to social stratification within American society. This paradox is viewed through a chronological lens that began in the eighteenth century and has provided an enduring legacy into the twenty-first century. The practical aspect of this book is to provide a historical, political, and pedagogical context for teacher candidates not only to comprehend the nature of racial segregation but as future educators understand their professional responsibility both in the community and in the school to strive for an integrated classroom where all children are given a chance to succeed. The goal of providing every child a world-class education is not only an ethical imperative, it is an inherent necessity for a functioning pluralistic democracy. The challenge is both great and growing, for teachers today will face an American classroom ever more segregated in the 2020s.

Since the very foundation of the Republic, Americans rich and poor, black and white, male and female have received qualitatively different educational opportunities. The historic quest for a more egalitarian model embodies the warp and woof of positive social change in public schools, for it goes to the heart of whether public education provides a fundamentally inclusionary or exclusionary function within the nation. There is much evidence via a historical examination of these two deeply held polarizing beliefs. The dueling philosophies of inclusion and exclusion both emanate from a web of intensely held yet contradictory views of the American experience.’ The inclusionary vision embraces a vibrant democracy, an educated citizenry, and concomitant personal and societal improvement.’ On the contrary, the exclusionary view imagines a type of intellectual meritocracy—a traditional bio-societal totem pole justified via the use of statistical data to effectively categorize society into a layered hierarchy. Typical public school mission statements articulate a dynamic faith in an inclusive learning process, seen as vital to a participatory democracy, which can be traced to the beginnings xiv Preface of the American Republic.* Nevertheless, there is an opposite and also genuinely American view—that of exclusion. It grew out of the eighteenthand nineteenth-century ideas of racial superiority, and was then adapted into philosophical notions such as Social Darwinism and later promoted and institutionally implemented by means of human intelligence test-based findings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The traditional belief in the inevitability of social stratification is one of the historical antecedents perpetuating the prevalence of structured inequality that continues to this day to promote defined academic tracks (e.g., perceived ability grouping) in the American classroom.’ Accordingly, from de jure and so-called de facto segregation to L.Q. rankings and standardized evaluations, to long-standing linkages between schooling and property values, the notion of exclusion to limit or effectively bar access to public education appears to have been implemented methodically over the last century.®

To better understand the phenomena of social stratification and its philosophic underpinnings, this book has three parts. Part 1 presents a historical analysis that examines the enduring legacy of past structured inequality. Part 2 is a consideration of the relationship between political power an educational policy with a special emphasis on the Southern Strategy, an explicit plan used since the mid-1960s by conservatives to gain political support in the former Confederate states in the South by appealing to traditional racist animus against African Americans. Part 3 is a pedagogic exploration of the fundamental flaw of structured inequality in the American educational system. In addition, there is a consideration of solutions that embrace constructive change in the classroom by implementing models of genuine inclusion, based on equality and equity for America’s twenty-first-century schools. It is this author’s intent, within the historic dialectic between the philosophies of inclusion and exclusion, to examine an underlying contradiction: public education that continually postures to be ever more inclusive while simultaneously perpetuating an exclusive system through systematic discrimination that maintains and even exacerbates inequality.

The public school is the last great meeting place of American democracy. Teacher candidates and the professors in teacher education programs in colleges and universities across the nation cannot afford to be ignorant or apathetic about the growing resegregation in America’s classrooms. What is called for is a knowledge of the historical, political, and pedagogical reality

Preface xv that functions as an environment of structured inequality. To those who ask, “Where does American education go from here?’ we must first understand where we are. The segregated school is a decaying building on a dead-end street. For a growing number of teachers and students that run-down edifice is precisely where we are. There is no Global Positioning System in the world that can tell us where we are going if we do not know where we are.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Toni Morrison once wrote that “if there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it” So, let me acknowledge so many of my graduate students who encouraged me to write a book to match our online discussions of the future schools we want to see in the United States. This multifaceted text that approaches the archetypal notions of inclusion and exclusion via an analysis of historical, political, and pedagogical realties could not have been written alone. Such a daunting task required the assistance and inspiration of some very special professionals. First, I would like to thank my editor, Elizabeth Demers, senior acquisitions editor, at the University of Michigan Press, who guided my manuscript though a rigorous peer-review process. I would also like to express my gratitude to Peter Serdyukov and Nilsa Thoros whose valuable counsel helped guide the text through its formative stages. In addition, many thanks to Matthew Laubacher for his counsel about both the style and substance of the final manuscript. Finally, I am indebted to Secretary Leon Panetta, who penned the foreword of Enduring Legacy, and whose distinguished career of service to our nation as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, and Congressman from California is among the most heralded of any person in American history. More germane for this book, however, was the secretary’s principled action when confronted with the directives of President Nixon who, as part of his Southern Strategy, desired a lack of enforcement of equal education laws in order to protect his political standing among Southern white voters. Secretary Panetta, as the then director of the Office of Civil Rights, resigned at age thirty-one in 1970, rather than accede to such policies. Such noble and selfless action then as now is more than laudable; it is necessary to challenge the half century of growing racial isolation from the 1970s to the 2020s in America’s classrooms.

Part 1

Figure 1. Students saying the Pledge of Allegiance at the Weill Public School in San Francisco in 1942. Those of Japanese descent later were sent to relocation centers for the duration of the war.

A Struggle between Forces

The traditional belief in the inevitability of social stratification via class, gender, and race is one of the historical antecedents perpetuating the prevalence of structured inequality in today’s American classroom. The history of public education in the United States may be viewed as a constant struggle between the forces of those who consistently espouse a message of hope and inclusion and others who systematically plan for the layered hierarchies of exclusion. Promoting the common good via public schools by strengthening participatory democracy via an educated citizenry has become, over time and trials, a deeply held American conviction that reflects the nation’s core values.’ Adlai Stevenson once observed in the middle of the twentieth century that “the most American thing about America is the free common school system”? The remark was surely meant to applaud the idea of a free public school—a shared expectation of an academy where every citizen is accepted and American democracy is celebrated. Yet today, just as in the Pledge of Allegiance with the oft-recited egalitarian promise of “liberty and justice for all” the assurance of an equal educational opportunity for every citizen remains not only an unfulfilled goal, but one that is in danger of becoming little more than sanctimonious rhetoric. Viewed from the reality of public education at present, a more conflicted (if unintended) yet more historically accurate meaning may be gleaned from Stevenson’s remark.

America’s public schools are presently undergoing a process of resegregation to the point that they are more segregated today than they were at any point in the last 40 years.’ Even in integrated schools, structured inequality routinely occurs via perceived ability grouping. Today, tracking (i.e., separating students into rigid homogenous groups based on a student’s perceived ability) is widespread in American public schools.

Tracking or ability grouping is a practice of grouping children together according to their “talents” in the classroom. The practice is ubiquitous across the United States. Based on perceived ability and other factors, schools (e.g., teachers, counselors, and administrators) group students into so-called remedial, regular, and advanced groups.* The remedial and regular groups uniformly received a less demanding academic curriculum than the advanced students. The rationale is based on the following assumptions. First, students’ intellectual differences are so great that a common curriculum would either slow down the higher-tracked students or hopelessly confuse the lower-tracked students. Second, students learn more grouped with those of similar ability. Third, lower-track students develop better attitudes when they are not grouped with higher-track students. Fourth, students are divided into relatively high academic and low academic groups via a fair method. Fifth, teachers find it easier to individualize instruction in homogeneous groups. The problem is that none of these assumptions are research based—and in fact there has long been much scholarly evidence to prove that tracking is harmful to many students."

Remedial classes historically do not remediate, nor do compensatory classes compensate. What is called for instead of tracking is to teach the most enriched curricula to all students via the widest variety of methodological approaches. In her article “Detracking in Social Studies: A Path to a More Democratic Education?,” Nora Hyland stated that “content goals and the pedagogical orientations of social studies classes lend themselves to detracking” She also noted that pedagogical practices recommended for teaching social studies are likewise implemented in successful detracked classrooms.’ There can be little question that the differences in the course-specific tracks students take (e.g., advanced, regular, or remedial offerings) across the curricula, especially in math, science, and foreign language, have a profound impact on student scores in the current high-stakes-testing environment. It has long been known and hardly surprising that the more rigorous the curriculum a learner is exposed to, the greater the opportunity for student achievement and consequently the higher the standardized test score. Those qualifying test results, the product of student work based to a great extent on exposure to enriched curricular content and concepts, can virtually open or close the door to higher education. Who succeeds and who is left behind in today’s competitive rankings-based society is subject all too often to a quantitative measure taken on an unbalanced playing field. To understand the practice of structured inequality within the American educational experience demands an examination of traditional perspectives, which continue to guide the public school at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The history of structured inequality in the nation’s schools has been deeply connected to social stratification within American society at large. There are various basic themes that can be viewed through a chronological lens that begin in the eighteenth century and provide an enduring legacy into the twenty-first century. First to be studied within the origin of America’s ambiguous philosophical roots are democratic values.’ Those ideals form a foundation of the nation’s evolution from the common school to the public school paradigm. Next, the dual nature of inclusionary language and exclusionary tradition will be examined in the segregationist polices reflected through Social Darwinism, white superiority via pseudo empiricism, and the promotion of assimilation by means of Americanism in the classroom. Finally, the personification of this duality—the paradox of promoting inclusion while practicing exclusion—will be viewed through Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (1868-1941). His life and legacy embodied the consequential movement to conceptualize perceived ability grouping, racial superiority, and the enduring legacy of structured inequality. History is not a simple linear narrative. It must be understood that educational inequality is not always the intentional and deliberate work of those who would deny justice to those most marginalized. An accurate history also includes an array of unintended consequences, ignorance, and apathy that also leads down the pathway of racist ideas, policies, and practices.

An Ambiguous Philosophical Root

Although the contemporary public school, a direct descendent of the common school, is supported via property taxes, tuition free, open to all children, and state regulated with day-to-day local control of local school boards, the philosophical root of the public school goes back to the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1749, “The good Education of Youth has been esteemed by wise Men in all Ages, as the surest Foundation of the Happiness both of private Families and of Common-wealths”™ It was Thomas Jefferson who in 1778 proposed to the Virginia Assembly “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” (subsequently voted down three times between 1779 and 1817). The bill promoted the concept of education that aimed to provide a natural aristocracy for the American experiment in democracy. Jefferson (1814) promoted a two-tiered educational system, with different tracks for “the laboring and the learned”! Moreover, the Jeffersonian vision of the common school, universal free education of every (white) boy for three years, and then a university education for the elite of this group, was revolutionary for the times: “By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed at the public expense’ Significantly, Jefferson’s ideas are a product of a conflicted American sociopolitical reality. Jefferson was a slave owner (said to own over 200 slaves) who at the same time believed in individual freedom and a type of national intellectual meritocracy.

Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin as depicted in a 1780 engraving.

Figure 3. An 1805 engraving of Thomas

Jefferson.

During Jefferson’s lifetime slavery was sustained by brutal force. Unlike many other Virginia landowners, Jefferson never freed his slaves. He seemed quite willing to profit off the bondage of others. Ibram X. Kendi posited that racism does not emanate alone from mere ignorance or blind hatred. Instead, it is also used as a justification to segregate and provide a rationale for inequities. Of course, it is obvious that the benefactors of those inequities were and are those in positions of power. One of Jefferson's slaves was Sally Hemmings. DNA studies by the Jefferson Foundation, along with documentary and statistical evidence, showed a high probability that Thomas Jefferson was most likely the father of Sally Hemings’s six children.’°

Jefferson's dual nature is an American enigma. Here was a man who wrote passionately about liberty and independence—who nevertheless had a personal socioeconomic acceptance of slavery, a practice that excluded an entire race of people (estimated at 20 percent of the American population at that time) from the benefits of liberty—and the educational opportunities needed to represent and sustain a participatory democracy for all people. Jefferson was conflicted over the matter of race and presents a pedagogical argument on its corrupting influence:

There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him.’°

Revolutionary for the time, yet divisive in nature, Jefferson’s twin schoolhouse ideals—a more inclusive brand of universal education and the inherently exclusive aforementioned notion that “geniuses will be raked from the rubbish’—are an expression of classic American pedagogical contradictory dualism. While spreading the first glimmer of hope and inclusion for some who had been traditionally shut out of a formal education (able white men), it is notable that his utopian vision did not include the same opportunities for women (there was a three-year limit to school for girls). Correspondingly, consistent with Jefferson’s practice of holding slaves (which he considered a form of moral depravity), people of color were not considered for formal schooling of any kind; indeed, it was among the gravest offenses to teach African Americans to read and write. For example, antiliteracy laws in antebellum Georgia gave official approval to illiteracy, as those decrees were meant to calm the worst fears concerning the power of educated African Americans.” Thus, the concept of individual freedom in the reality of the late eighteenth century excluded the majority of the American population and was restricted to freedom for certain white male individuals.

In many ways, Jefferson's plea for more schooling embodies a reoccurring schizophrenia in the American view of education. This kind of duality in the American experience has also been noted by Ibram X. Kendi. He posited there is no singular movement on the issue of racism, but two distinct historical forces proclaiming equality and decreeing inequality. So it is now and so it was then with Jefferson. Although a slave owner, there is the clear impulse for the hopeful notion of inclusion—the egalitarian side of the Jeffersonian duality of mind promoting education for all “without regards to wealth, birth, or accidental condition”?! It is an argument that rhetorically soars in the laudatory quest for an informed democracy. Correspondingly, Jefferson's writings are replete with the stated conviction that democracy can best function with an educated citizenry. In an 1816 letter to Colonel Charles Yancy, Jefferson intoned, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be”? Notwithstanding Jefferson’s eloquent analysis of the imperative nature of public education in the securing and maintaining of liberty, one is also presented with the dehumanizing exclusionary image of clearing away the “rubbish” and, after disposing of trash, presumably producing a new strain of American students to become a merit-based elite.” While Jefferson’s words and practices may seem inconsistent, the unambiguous historical record of exclusion toward all but certain white males begs for a fundamental rationale for those eighteenth-century leaders (e.g., attendees at the Constitutional Convention of 1789) who freely chose to make a distinction between races. Of course, questioning the mind and soul of eighteenth-century leaders—particularly Jefferson—is fraught with issues of time, place, and intention. One must be mindful of the notion of presentism, a bias to interpret of past events using today’s twenty-first-century perspectives.

To be historically accurate as to the rationale of America’s founding fathers demands a holistic view of that time and place and the genuine intention of founding a republic. No doubt Jefferson's view and stated aim for republican schools was to provide new leaders via formal education that would be both inclusive (to able white men) and hierarchical. Nevertheless, his republicanism can be conceptually viewed in terms of an eighteenth-century sociopolitical reality as a merger of the “pursuit of happiness” within the Declaration of Independence with legalized slavery nascent in the Constitution. In Jefferson’s case, it could be argued that his opinions were not (solely) based on blind bigotry or the avarice of slave owners, but a far more seductive theory that stems from eighteenth-century study of natural history. Jefferson expresses among his many doubts about race relations a “suspicion” of racial superiority. Thus, among the intelligentsia of that time there was a kind of “naturally” designed discrimination. This type of racism based on empirical observation and naive extrapolation took root early on American soil.