Why is it when silly decisions by this Court are attacked by the people on the left they don't seem so silly any more. This decision does not overturn Brown. Discrimination in schools based on race is still unconstitutional. The issue what happens when the schools have long stopped such discrimination and hounsing patterns, maybe based on racism but perhaps based on personal preference results in resegregated schools.

the use the schools were using race seems rather benign. The Court is using a sledgehammer to swat a flea. However, how long should race be used not to end racism but to creete diversity? Is racism for discriminaory ended in the U.S.? Of course not but it is still illegal. This is obvious by the far shakier goal of diversity as justification for race based solution.

It is an unfortunated decision but to have hysterics about it is over the top.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Discrimination in the USA is ended! The Chief Justice said so!

Somebody tell Senator Obama:
WASHINGTON (AP) Democratic presidential candidates debating in Washington have roundly criticized today's Supreme Court ruling limiting race as a factor in achieving diversity. Senator Barack Obama said if not for the court's 1954 ruling banning racial segregation, and other precedents, he wouldn't be standing there.

There is a natural human tendency to self-segregate. This happens in democracies and at dinner parties. It is a problem for both institutions, as it reduces social cohesion and limits the possibilities for creativity, enjoyment, and excellence. Effectively, it blocks members of a group from accessing all of the public goods which they would be able to access if the space were integrated. In a self-segregated prison cafeteria, a white inmate may be unable to access the ketchup, if it is at an all-black table; if the tables were mixed-race, any inmate would be able to access the ketchup.

In some discriminatory institutions, dominated by one subgroup, these segregating rules are hard-coded for the benefit of the dominant group: "Men only in the dining room, wives in the kitchen"; "No black children in white schools." In other institutions, which recognize the dangers of segregation, rules are devised explicitly to integrate public space and prevent self-segregation -- as in the classic dinner-party rules of "boy-girl boy-girl" or "no spouses next to each other" seating.

The court's decision in the Louisville/Seattle cases is based on the premise that rules which explicitly mandate integration are just like rules which explicitly mandate segregation, in that both of them tell people what to do and who to associate with based on their membership in a certain class. In other words, "Men only in the dining room, wives in the kitchen" is just like "boy-girl boy-girl" seating, in that both of them mandate seating arrangements based on gender.

It should be intuitively obvious that rules which integrate social space are part of an egalitarian society, while rules which segregate a social space are part of a discriminatory and inegalitarian society. This is true whether we are talking about dinner parties or democracies. This is the very meaning of "separate but equal is inherently unequal". And it should be equally obvious that pretending that these rules are equivalent -- that "women in the kitchen" is the same as "boy-girl boy-girl" -- is an argument which could only be made by people who wish to preserve their ability to segregate themselves.

Accumulating Peripherals

The post is totally unintelligible.

global citizen

I grew up in a town in New Jersey where there were about 5, maybe 10 African-Americans in a high school of 1200 and went to a university in Pennsylvania where there was one African-American per year admitted out of 700. I do not think that the schools were consciously segregated, the segregation was created by wealth and the absence of it.

Seattle and Louisville sought to avoid experieces like that for more children of all races and the court, on behalf of the federal government, ruled that the forced segregation (apartheid) of income cannot be softened in the interest of quality education.

Only Nat King Cole, among African-Americans, was ever on televison.

I am horrified by this decision. How the hell could anyone know that they wanted to self-segregate if they had never had the opportunity to meet people of other races. They will perhaps be uncomfortable because they have just never had the experience.

These plans had wide public support. So does environmental protection. So does the minimum wage. One more appointment (and maybe even that is unnecessary) and they are going to go too. These guys are Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch and George Wallace in Black robes.

global citizen

All you are saying is true, but here's a question: Is it right to tell parents "your kid can't go to this school because of his/her skin color"?

I think the answer is 'we are trying to keep all the schools reasonably balanced in terms of race, as best we can in the interest of creating the best educational experience for all'. That said, I can understand that this could be difficult in some cases as when someone bought a house in order to be very near to a particular school so the kids could walk home easily and their kids are then need to get on a bus. Hopefully, a plan could be devised that minimizes such situations or even eliminates them. (Perhaps put in a rule that says anyone within x blocks can't be shifted to a significantly greater distance, for example.)

This stuff is not easy. In fact where I grew up you would need to link school systems not only with bordering towns, but with those 3 or 4 miles away to have gotten significant integration.

global citizen

Brilliant, Greg.  Simply Brilliant.  Period.

aMike

Roberts' incompetence is showing.

Perhaps he thinks that asking permission to sit under the "whites only" tree in the Mississippi school and as a result getting threatened with lynching is an example "stopping discrimination based on race?"

To a large degree children end up paying for the sins of the parents. If generations of Americans have allowed pernicious segregation to fester within this nation it is inevitable that their children will have to pay the costs, in one way or another.

This is also true of the economic stratification taking place now. Eventually a terrible price will be paid.

The infantile myths within our culture that at root value the idea of the free individual roaming around caring not about their relationship to others, aggrandizing themselves as they see fit with no thought of where their wealth is ultimately derived, willfully ignoring the consequences of their actions always result in pain when confronting reality. 

This pain is often mis-characterized  as being caused by the efforts of those that are in fact struggling to right terrible wrongs , that see the  deep  consequences of willful ignorance and that share the pain as well.

You ask "is it right?" It may not be right or wrong, but it may be better than the alternatives.

We know what the United States was like before the advent of Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights laws, anti-discrimination regulations, and affirmative action. anrig

And yet, only Brown v. Board is a factor in the Supreme Court's decision.

Brown v. Board's findings are based upon the cultural anthropological conclusions of Gunnar Myrdal, who characterized American society as caste-based. The result was that psychologically, African-Americans had come to deprecate their own self-worth. The society's attack upon Black America's self-esteem was seen to begin in the schools -- black children were taught that they were unworthy, too stupid, too unmannerly, too ugly to attend white schools. School integration was the answer to a racism which was based on a psychology which reinforced social caste.

But is that finding -- if true then -- any consideration, at all, today? Black is Beautiful. Powell and Rice are high government officials; Obama runs for President. Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit are long gone. What, in fact, is left of the underpinning of Brown?

And in its absence, is Brown v. Board anything more than an historical curiosity?

As much as telecommuting improves the energy problem, feline assistance is a matter that still needs refinement. Mind, I suppose it was editorial feedback when I had the galley proofs of a book spread out on a table, and he delivered hairballs to two chapters.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

his time the damage will take the form of inducing at least some school boards to give up on the mission of reducing racial isolation in their districts. Does anyone have a catchy slogan about that?

yeah:

nigger, get back.

Yes, I have a catchy phrase for what the Supreme Court's decision should be called:

"Separate but Equal"

Correct. As I said, self-segregation is perfectly natural. So are assault and theft. Most of our legal code is devoted to preventing people from engaging in "natural" behavior which we find harmful to society for various reasons. If it weren't "natural", it wouldn't be much of a problem, would it?

Societies in which biker gangs are forced to associate and compromise with the rest of the community have better-behaved biker gangs. Societies in which bars are forced to come to agreements with nearby churches have less underage drinking. Here's an extreme case: for 2 months one summer, I sent my then 2-year-old daughter to a lovely public creche (one of the first in Holland, with a proud history dating back over 100 years) located next to Amsterdam's "Old Church", in the middle of the red light district. Drug deals were done in the lane in front of the creche all evening and early morning. At the hours when the kids arrived or left, the alley was magically empty of anyone but tourists. One day I found out why: just once, while dropping my daughter off, I watched an African heroin dealer get into an argument with an East European customer. A short Dutch man with huge biceps, clearly the heroin boss of the area, came charging down the alley: "What the hell are you guys doing? The kids are arriving! Get the hell out of the alley, go take this somewhere else!" That creche was safer than any little-observed exurban school ground; it was part of a tight social compact, with dozens of eyes on it all the time. When we self-segregate instead of engaging with the rest of our society, we do our society harm.

Look: "affirmative action" to ensure an integrated public sphere is part of the public interest. Political science research over the last 10 years in India has shown that the single leading factor determining which cities have interfaith riots and which don't is whether or not the cities have important public institutions with both Hindus and Muslims on the boards, making deals with each other, interacting. We allow our cities to self-segregate at the risk of violence in our future. When a community like Seattle or Louisville decides that integration is crucial to its future, and arrives at a common system for fighting self-segregation in the public interest, the Supreme Court should leave that community alone to do what it wants to do. Should kids be obliged to give up music for this goal? No. But maybe, just maybe, if there were a risk that your kid might lose his orchestra by being sent to an underprivileged school, then the community might finally see fit to come up with enough money to give every school an orchestra. Doesn't that get closer to a reasonable definition of "fair"?

Accumulating Peripherals

There is simply nothing wrong with taking the approach that children should have an equal opportunity for an education in our society. And that would mean schools should be equally funded so those opportunities are available to all. It also means that those schools bearing the increased costs of non-English-speaking children as well as children with challenges should receive additional funding.

It simply isn't being done. Instead we function with a binary system of socially engineered integration that categorizes children as "black" and "all others" as if that were the only categories that matter. And with our public educational system not delivering, it seems to me it is time to address that non-delivery and not the 1950's issue of "integration solving all ills". It solved some and it was needed.

It is simply time to move on and start holding school districts responsible for educating children instead of meeting artificially erected racial percentages. And, yes, I live in an urban area that is predominantly minority and the schools are a shambles.

It has always seemed to me that the tone and severity of the integration plans in the past 40 years or so was set long ago, in reaction to the flagrant hatreds and elaborate hysteria in Little Rock and Boston, to name a couple of archetypal examples. The images out of these communities are part of the background of forced busing and integration plans imposed by federal judges in communities all over America, and shaped a somewhat ambiguous public opinion that *something* needed to be done.

I submit that the tactics to overcome racial segregation, though for the best of intentions, were often heavy-handed, bureaucratic and, in the end, cruel to small children and their parents, whose only sin was being poor and living in the wrong neighborhood. One can agree that the goal was, and is, worthy, but that the approaches taken in the past few decades were anything but perfect. The law of unintended consequences, as it were, played out on a national stage.

IANAL, but I've lived in communities where forced busing was mandated by federal judges, and at the time, I generally thought that the ends justified the means. But having had children of my own in the meantime, and having seen them navigate the public school bureaucracy, has taught me that we have somehow lost sight of the cost to little children in all of this, even as we told ourselves that the greater good was being served. I don't know how to reconcile this.

You assume that if a child goes to a racially mixed school--rather than a nearly-all-white school--he cannot possibly get as good an education.
Why?

Strikes me, too, that one solution would be rather obvious...make sure that all schools have orchestras.  I suspect the orchestra/no orchestra matrix wasn't entirely random.  I suspect I'm not the only one who suspects that.  Hmmm... why am I so suspicious? 

aMike

Did justice Roberts say that statement about discrimination with his KLAN robes on?

You can change America today! Go to http://dmocrats.org and look for the statement with the title Send this letter to congress today!

The new decision will force more "economic" integration, making it harder to retain preferential schools for the upper middle class.

It will be interesting to watch the litigation here.  I don't think I'll live to see the end of it, and given my genes, assuming I don't get hit by a truck, I'm figuring I may well have 25 years left. The situation is complicated by the fact that most jurisdictions support public education through property taxes, and control of schools and school budgets is local. 

This raises an interesting conundrum:  how does one get persons living in richer communities to tax themselves to support quality education in poorer communities?  Alternately, is there a mechanism or should there be a mechanism which caps expenditures in school districts which could afford over the moon educational budgets because poor districts don't have the revenue to compete.  There are cases moving up in the court systems in several states testing some of these ideas.

The interesting thing to me is that some economic remedies were tried in the years between Plessy and Brown.  The case law is found in the footnotes, and is dry enough reading lower the humidity several degrees, but if you're up to it, it makes interesting reading.

aMike

I think Corvid was referring to affirmative action policies at elite universities which impose a high cost on only a very few whites, who must attend a less prestigious schools. He makes a good point that the cost of remedying current social ills should be born by all white people, not just a few.

I have no disagreement with what you say.  Constitutions of the states generally do set requirements for education, and state laws or state constitutions set the date for leaving the educational system.  My point is that in most, if not every state, the funding mechanism is the property tax, which is assessed and administered locally.  In most states local school boards are elected with responsibilities to the state boards of education for curriculum, but responsible to local electors for any decision they make regarding funding.  In communities with significant populations of single persons or in communities with an aging population, or in communities with a significant proportion of students in private schools, getting either a one or two mil increase in the tax rate or passing a bond levy for schools is incredibly difficult. 

We can demand adequate funding from the appropriate source all we want.  I have no kids and I've never voted against a school board member for advocating a tax increase.  I've never voted against a bond issue for education, either.  But what I do in my town has no effect on what happens tax-wise in the towns to the north or south of me.  And, just as political power follows the money in Washington, it also follows the money in the States.  That's all I'm suggesting.

aMike

That's what would really solve this problem. Integrating urban and nearby suburban school districts. Suburban schools often have advantages in property tax revenues and parental involvement. In Greater Boston, there is a program to send some inner-city students who would otherwise attend subpar Boston public schools to surburban schools instead.

I think Corvid was referring to affirmative action policies at elite universities which impose a high cost on only a very few whites, who must attend a less prestigious schools. He makes a good point that the cost of remedying current social ills should be born by all white people, not just a few.

Oh gee whiz, so does this mean it's harder for the George W. Bush's and the Paris Hilton's to get into Harvard on a legacy admission?

Cry me a river. Somehow, I fail to perceive this as a discrimination against the elite.

Seriously.

For those who want to know more about legacies and that kind of stuff, let me recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission:  How America's Ruling Class Buys its way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates. Golden is pretty well situated to put this story forward.  He worked for the Boston Globe for years and is himself a Harvard Grad.  He provides over twenty well documented pages about Harvard's "Committee on University Resources" the group of major donors, and the ability of members of this group to buy their way into Harvard.  Golden writes:

"I found that 218 of 424 COUR members , or more than half, have had at least one child at Harvard.  Many donors send more than one child to Harvard, bringing the total number of COUR members' offspring who have enrolled there over the years to at least 336.  Nearly 300 of these children attended Harvard as undergraduates, with most of the rest attending the law and business schools, which provide an entrée into the corridors of American power.

Since, by my count, at least eighty COUR members either do not have children or their children have not reached college age, the number of COUR offspring who have gone to Harvard works out to 336 children of about 340 eligible members--an astonishing enrollment rate of one child per major donor."

This, at a school which rejects 1/2 of the students who apply with perfect SAT scores. 

The book is a great read:  the outrage palpable.

aMike

I'm not sure where, given l'affaire Libby, what to do with an old story.

"My son is in Yale."

"why look so sad? What's your name, anyway?"

"Yohnson."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

The society's attack upon Black America's self-esteem was seen to begin in the schools -- black children were taught that they were unworthy, too stupid, too unmannerly, too ugly to attend white schools. School integration was the answer to a racism which was based on a psychology which reinforced social caste.

But is that finding -- if true then -- any consideration, at all, today?

Yes, Ellen it remains true today. Check out this video 50 years later after Kenneth Clark's doll test  that was originally used in the Brown v. Board case to substantiate the psychological impact of segregated schools. 

B-