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This concluding chapter summarizes the book's findings and considers what the lack of true integration in American schools means for today's youth. Reflecting on the hardships created by classroom racial isolation, the chapter offers suggestions for ways that schools might address the most damaging aspects of racialized tracking and reduce, rather than reinforce, the conditions that encourage students' casting academic achievement as acting white. Lastly, it suggests new directions for future research on the topic of acting white and academic achievement. In addressing these core issues, the chapter looks at the relationship between race and achievement in American schools.

The issue of residential segregation has had a long history in the development of school desegregation laws and policies. Most social scientists and jurists would agree that school segregation is closely associated with racial segregation in housing, particularly in larger school systems. Residential segregation can give rise to school segregation between school systems, such as that existing between a predominantly minority city school system and its predominantly white suburban systems, and within a single school system when a neighborhood school policy reflects segregated residential patterns. The debate over the relationship between housing and school segregation arises, however, not from the mere fact of association, but from the causal interpretations applied to this association. Two major issues have framed the debates over this relationship. One issue concerns the causes of housing segregation itself, whether it arises primarily from discriminatory actions, either public or private, or from a complex set of social, economic, and demographic forces in which discrimination plays only a secondary role. The second issue focuses on the causal connections between school segregation and housing segregation and the direction of the causal relationship: the extent to which a neighborhood school policy actually contributes to housing segregation (rather than simply reflecting it) and the extent to which school desegregation contributes to integrated housing choices. On these points there is sharp disagreement between and within the social science and legal communities. The debates within the social science and legal communities have had reciprocating influences. On the one hand, a considerable amount of research on housing segregation has been generated by school desegregation litigation. On the other, a number of court decisions about the role of housing in school desegregation cases have been influenced by social science research and expert testimony. Thus the relationship between judicial policy and social science research is well illustrated by the housing segregation issue. The role of residential segregation in school desegregation law has itself passed through several stages during the past thirty years of school desegregation litigation.

This chapter examines the effects of the First World War to Japanese diplomacy. The Great War created circumstances—economic hardship in Europe and an aggressive mentality in America—that would turn East Asia into a field for ruthless exploitation by the Western powers once the fighting in the West stopped. In short, heightened competition and aggression, not peace, would follow in the wake of the war. In the face of this threat, Japan stood in diplomatic and racial isolation with no spiritual ally but China to withstand a potential coalition of white powers. The Great War thus offered Japan an unprecedented yet temporary opportunity to strengthen itself and secure the friendship of the peoples of Asia.

The late 19th and 20th century Great Migration of southern Black Americans permanently changed Chicago, with Mayors RJ and RM Daley overseeing its segregated neighborhoods. The dual Daley dynasty spanned more than four decades, including ML King’s 1960s housing marches and activist Fred Hampton’s assassination. With RM Daley’s apparent knowledge, a “midnight crew” led by detective Jon Burge tortured more than one hundred Black suspects during the 1970s–1990s. Burge’s tenure included the 1982 tortured confession of a police killer, Andrew Wilson, which coincided with RM Daley’s first unsuccessful effort to win a nomination for Mayor. The suspicion that Daley was awarene of the torture lasted throughout his career. With Daley’s acquiescence, Burge eluded criminal conviction until 2010. A police code of silence covered up Burge’s torture and his racist criminality, masquerading behind badges of law and legality. The failure to prosecute Burge for torture crimes showed how a naive belief in the rule of law could devastate the hyper-segregated neighborhoods of a quintessential American city.