aims to delegitimize the very civil rights legal framework that had allowed for the conferral of group-based political rights to “protected” racial minorities in the first place. Here, the political intention was to reduce discourses of racial equality and justice from their then-current rootedness in “group rights” principles (a legal recognition hard-earned in the civil rights movement) to largely individual terms—that is, that any individual could be subject to discrimination based on being a victim of the unjust practice of racial preferencing. In other words, the civil rights framework calling for collective equality based on a desirable “equality of result” was to be delegitimized and replaced with one meant to provide a less-specific equality of opportunity for individuals, which could only be achieved through neutral, color-blind policies and strict opposition to any kind of “race thinking” in public policy decision-making.
This reframing of civil-rights-as-individual- rights could find its justification in U.S. liberal democratic principles that have long held group identity and status to be obstacles to the possibility of individual freedom, favored national unity over equality, and viewed the successful American as a self-motivated agent who values a concept of self free from group affiliation and from the past (Schmidt 2000). By intentionally rooting citizenship entitlements in individual rights, those whose wished to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement could present themselves as opponents of both racial discrimination and any antidiscrimination measure based on “group rights” principles—namely, desegregation and affirmative action policies (Omi and Winant 1994: 130).
This powerful populist development, reflected in and amplified by the election of U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1969, led to broad attacks on civil rights strategies, with Nixon himself taking an open and active stance against busing as a means of desegregation, and promising “to restrain HEW’s efforts in the South and to produce a more conservative Justice Department and Supreme Court” (Orfield 1978: 6). Nixon’s appointment of four political conservatives to crucial federal justice positions helped fuel a division in the U.S. Supreme Court regarding its role in directing the desegregation process (Chemerinsky 2003). The Court’s 1974 opinion (5-4) in Milliken v. Bradley reinforced the importance of the “local control” of schools “as essential to both the maintenance of community concern and the support for public schools and to the quality of the educational process,” while its 1977 decision in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman (Dayton I) affirmed “local autonomy” with the status of a “vital national tradition . . . long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and the support of public schools and the quality of the educational process” (Bell 1995: 23). By the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, the Supreme Court’s rulings on school desegregation more clearly reflected a growing political interest in abandoning the goal of integrating children and moving (back) toward the idea of the “neighborhood school” and arrangements favoring “parental choice.”6 Backing away from hard-fought efforts to push racial integration, federal courts increasingly endorsed “separate but equal” schooling situations, authorizing the diversion of federal desegregation funds from financing integration to enhancing the quality of curriculum at all schools.7
These shifts in school desegregation decision making, and the transformed notions of citizenship they reflected, must also be understood in relation to the extensive suburbanization underway in the late twentieth century, as unprecedented White flight harkened a distinctive transformation in regional politics, particularly in California, where significant political power shifted toward the suburbs. As Ewan McKenzie (1996) has noted, the rise of suburban homeowners associations and other private common interest developments (CIDs) led to the growth of de facto private (residential) government and an increasingly privatized notion of citizenship rights among suburban-dwelling homeowners (see also Kruze 2005; Cashin 2001). Widespread fees levied by residential associations for private services fueled a growing sense of resentment among suburban homeowners for having to “pay more than their share” in allegedly “duplicate” public services, and helped generate a belief that, should they be expected to pay more, it ought to come with the assurance that such spending serve their own interests and not be earmarked for “redistributional” purposes.8 The political legitimacy and justification for such claims of entitlement could be rooted in a longer tradition of U.S. individual rights-based liberalism that assumes the right of citizens, as property owners and taxpayers, to rule their own matters on as local a scale as possible (Lehning 1998).
Under the rubric of “local community control” and through claims of local autonomy, residents of suburban communities were increasingly able to justify utilizing their assets to benefit their own communities and fight for upwardly redistributive policies (and against downwardly redistributive policies) for the expenditure of state and federal funds with little or no reference to the race and class composition of the communities benefiting from these policies (Barlowe 2003).9 This “common sense” suturing of property rights and political rights gained significant traction during the late twentieth century expansion of U.S. suburbanization, as the right to “local control” of public resources and institutions—including public schools—came to be increasingly understood as an entitlement akin to homeownership, merited by virtue of one’s privileged (suburban) residential location and relative socioeconomic status. As McKenzie has argued, the rise of private residential government has helped create a society of suburban homeowners who tend to equate citizen rights with property rights and who seem to share one strong political cause: a near obsessive concern with maintaining or upgrading property values. McKenzie spoke, somewhat prophetically, of a time in which suburban homeowners “may develop an attenuated sense of loyalty and commitment to the public communities in which their CIDs are located, even to the point of virtual or actual secession” (1996: 186). Richard Reich (1991) has called this phenomenon the “secession of the successful,” and Charles Murray warns that it may be the beginning of a new “caste society” in which privatization of local government will lead to a powerful public constituency campaigning to bypass the social institutions they don’t like (quoted in Reich 1991:187).10
Suburban School District “Secessionism” and the Politics of Deserved Segregation
The school district reorganization campaign that is the focus of this study, emerging as it did in the mid-1990s, became immediately known by its opponents as the “Allenstown school district secession campaign.” In my own analysis of the decade-long initiative, I have elected to retain the politicized language of secession because I believe that this campaign—and other citizen-led, suburban school district “reorganization” efforts like it—can be related to other, largely middle-class movements to “secede from responsibility” in a political opportunity structure made possible by the reigning influence of economic neoliberalism, the increase of suburban privatization, and the combined role they have played in reshaping U.S. political and economic life (Boudreau and Keil 2001). Suburban school secession movements, I argue, should be viewed in relation to similar kinds of phenomena emerging not just in the United States, but on a global scale, including territorial secession efforts (like those in Los Angeles in the 1990s) and the increased construction of gated communities and walled cities about which there is an interesting and growing body of ethnographic literature (Caldeira 2000; Lowe 2003; Rivera-Bonilla 1999). What suburban school secession campaigns share with these territorial and community-fortification counterparts is their status as mostly class-based and strongly racialized movements of social separation couched in political terms, that is, articulated in a language of civil rights and liberalism (Boudreau and Keil 2001: 1702). In other words, they tend to use a common set of arguments to justify their actions, including an expressed desire for local control, an expectation of greater return on tax dollars locally, a fear of bureaucracy and big government, and a sense that they, as privileged members of the suburban middle class, are not getting a fair share of what they deserve. Moreover, citizen groups see themselves as fair players, claiming that they—as well as the regions from which they seek separation—will be better off in a “divorce” (1718–19). The populist appeal of citizen-led school district secession campaigns, much like that of their territorial counterparts, is predicated on their ability to frame their arguments in a rhetoric of efficiency and boosterism in ways that effectively capture the imagination of middle-class residents (1723). In the case of school district secessionism,