Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equity and Civic Renewal in Public Education by Lawrence Blum and Zoë Burkholder, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021

The book Integrations: The struggle for racial equality and civic renewal in public education by Blum and Burkholder pulls apart and reassembles readers’ understandings of racial integration in public schools in the United States. The book leaves readers with an understanding of the coordinated efforts to both promote and prevent racial integration in public schools. In the process of describing these efforts, the authors explain that racial integration cannot be a stand-in for equality. The authors dismantle several arguments for integration, including access to resources and capital, that rely on the very same racist structures that integration was designed to end. They quote Robert Carter, a civil rights activist and NYC district court judge, who said that integration was the means to an end, not the end itself (p. 58). This is a critical point that helps readers disentangle the notions of desegregation, integration, and equality. Blum and Burkholder argue that the true value of integration is not equality at all; integration is valuable because it has the potential to prepare students to live in a democratic, multiracial society. This book is a powerful educational tool that complicates the intellectual conversation about equality and integration and suggests interesting pathways towards renewed civic and moral education. I did not approach Blum and Burkholder’s book as a philosopher, but as someone who teaches social justice education courses in university. In this capacity, I have drawn on the extensive research in Blum and Burkholder’s text to illustrate foundational ideas in my courses, including historical examples of how whiteness is wielded as a political tool of those in power, and is not an inherent trait. As someone who studies moral education, I was interested in the articulation of the connection between racial integration and moral education. One central argument from Blum and Burkholder is that moral capabilities are one type of essential educational good. Educational goods are the skills, mindsets, types of development, and growth that all students should have by the time they leave school. The possession of educational goods, they argue, is how we should measure equality, and specifically racial equality, in schools. There are four categories of educational goods: intellectual, personal growth/flourishing, moral capabilities, and civic. The authors state that these categories overlap and all are intrinsically and instrumentally valuable. The authors explain that moral capabilities include a critical awareness and commitment to rectifying racial injustice. They write, “Civic and moral education should help students … gain an understanding of race as a social force and social phenomenon, commit to rectifying racial injustice and other racial ills, use their learned capability to analyze racial phenomena in service of informing their civic commitments, and recognize the meaningfulness to others of their ethnoracial identities” (p. 164). This direct connection between race and morality provides a useful mandate for the field of moral education to take up race, racial identity, and racism in classroom spaces. The words “analyze” and “commit” stand out in the argument quoted above. Moral educators would probably agree that one cannot just present students with answers when it comes to racial justice or any controversial topic; force-feeding students involves zero critical thinking, and the student has no opportunity to be changed. Instead, students should be provided with opportunities to analyze new information and then commit to action. Blum and Burkholder expand on this idea of active construction of learning: “The purpose of education (in its personal growth, moral, and civic modes) is therefore to provide students with the ability to form values of their own, which they recognize may not align with dominant sociocultural values at a given time. …