Two decades after the release of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, a well-known educator and president emeritus of Spelman College, the text continues to be used in classrooms across the nation. Tatum was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving a presentation to higher education administrators at Harvard University recently when we chatted with her about the release of the 20th anniversary edition of the best-selling book.
DI: What new information can we expect to read about in this new book?
BDT: It’s about a hundred pages longer, so I had a lot to say. I started the book — the new version — by reflecting on what has happened in terms of the social and political context of the last 20 years. The population has changed quite a bit over the last 20 years, as a consequence of differential birth rates, the rising population of Latinos and African-Americans, and a declining White population. But mostly, it’s changed as a result of immigration — large flows of immigration from Asia, Africa, Latin America. So, think about today’s population. Today’s population is 63 percent White. And, if you look at the younger population, I think 2014 was the first year that [among] grade school children — K-12 — kids of color represented 50 percent of the population.
So, there’s been a big shift in the demographics, and yet we still have the same patterns in terms of school population and neighborhood segregation. So, as I like to say, “New faces, same places.”
The persistence of school and neighborhood segregation and, in the last 20 years, the backlash against affirmative action and the economic disparities caused by the great recession of 2008 all have created a particularly regressive social environment so that some of the same issues that I wrote about 20 years ago in terms of the dynamics in schools and the kind of ways that racism plays itself out in daily life still are a part of our landscape in some cases.
DI: Many people consider the original version groundbreaking. What made you want to build upon that information?
BDT: Well, 20 years later, there’s a lot more information. The year 1997 was the end of the 20th century. And here we are in 2017, almost two decades into the 21st century. But the question “Why are the Black kids still sitting together in the cafeteria?” is one that’s still asked. And it’s not necessarily that the answer to that particular question is different, but I think we have to reflect on the ways in which our society has changed or isn’t changing.
