George Will's recent column on the Seattle High School "desegregation" case illustrates the great tragedy inherent in one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most famous cases: Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Almost no one doubts that the Court was right in its central finding: that racial segregation as practiced in the South and elsewhere at the time violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. I certainly think the Court was right.
Unfortunately, the Court chose not to ground its finding on anything in the letter or logic of the Constitution, which it could easily have done. Instead, it based the result on the most insubstantial social science. Here is the Court's sole reason for overturning segregation:
To separate [Negro children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.
Now that principle may or may not be true (there is in fact no evidence for it), but it goes way beyond the Court's expertise. Worse, it prevented the Court from declaring the one true Constitutional principle that might have come out of the case: that no child could be barred from any school solely on the basis of his or her race or color. Instead, it virtually required school districts to assign students on the basis of race, in order to achieve some kind of racial balance that was presumed to prevent "feelings of inferiority." The Court never managed to define what that racial balance consisted in, but it inaugurated a national policy of racial gerrymandering in education that is still going on a half century later.
This is what Seattle has made of the Court's logic, according to Will:
Students can seek admission to any of Seattle's high schools. But the Seattle School District decided to engineer a precise racial balance in its most popular - because much better - high schools, which are chosen by more students than they can accommodate. The district wanted each oversubscribed school to reflect the entire system's ratio of 40 percent whites and 60 percent nonwhites.
This requires, of course, admitting students on a racial basis, and telling some students that they cannot attend good schools a stone's throw from their own neighborhoods merely because those students are the wrong "skin tone." The results are grim for some young people.
This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep.
The Kurfirsts and Bachwitzs could apparently afford to send their kids to private schools. Imagine the single mother of three who must pack her kids off for that trip every day.
But that does not exhaust the wonders of Seattle progressives. The school district website contained a very revealing account of "racism," according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as 'other,' different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers," the definition said.
It's hard to argue against most of this, except of ground of bad writing. And it's just as hard to know who, if anyone, is making these racist claims. But is it really "White" for a high school student to plan for the future? Is it really racist to prefer individual rights to communism? Apparently Seattle thinks so, or did until it yanked this absurd language from its website.
In fact the genius of the Founding Fathers, the genius that was given expression in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement, was grounded precisely in individual freedom. Had the Court taken that genius for its guidance in 1954, instead of endorsing a muddle-headed social engineering, it would have been a shining moment in Supreme Court history. Instead it gave us fifty years (so far) of anguish, busing, and deplorable English.
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