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Commentary By Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

The Economics of Integration

Culture Culture & Society, Race

The academic literature largely backs up my grandmother’s views on its benefits and necessity.

No topic was more prevalent around my grandmother’s Sunday dinner table than the effect of segregation on black people. Over generous helpings of mashed potatoes, collard greens and pork chops smothered in brown gravy, I heard stories, some true and some rumored, about how segregation had shaped our community and those at the table.

Those folks had taken it upon themselves to undo segregation where they found it. My grandmother integrated schools as a sixth-grade teacher in Port Orange, Fla., in 1969. My great-aunt and great-uncle were the first black school principals in the area.

But growing up in the 1980s, I expressed mild skepticism of desegregation’s importance: My integrated high school was as socially segregated as humanly possible, or so I thought. The black kids hung out with the black kids, the white kids hung out with the white kids. Only in locker rooms did we mix.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)

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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is professor of economics at Harvard University and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.

Photo by Yevehen Borysov/Getty Images