I’ll be visiting UC Berkeley on the Zoom machine to talk about one chapter of my work in progress. Here’s a brief sample of the content:

This chapter is about the changing color of public space. It offers a critical secularism studies angle on the story of desegregation, focusing in particular on how the coding of public space as “white” shifted over time, with profound effects for tax-funded schools. Whereas white supremacy had been legally baked into Jim Crow-era laws and customs as a form of public reason, after Brown v. Board of Education segregationists turned to notions of private choice to preserve their preferred public order, using complicated pupil assignment schemes and “school choice” regimes to maintain segregation. However, legal trends across the three branches of the federal government made it increasingly untenable for tax-funded schools in any jurisdiction to maintain these de facto segregationist admissions policies. With public space now effectively “colored,” white families increasingly decamped to private whites-only “segregation academies.” When these academies came under IRS scrutiny, they increasingly allied with churches, using religious free exercise claims to protect their right to exclude non-white pupils. These machinations prompted a wholesale reconfiguration of the racialized balance between public and private and consequently changed popular perceptions of the relationship between religion and schools, family and state.