Judicial Retreat

I’ve been thinking for a while about the Supreme Court ruling that ended the use of race as a determining factor in school assignment. Its effect weakens the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

On the one hand, since all people are equal under the law, it is logical that schools – or business, if we want to extend it to effective ends – not be able to use race as a qualifier. However, if this is the basis for the Court’s decision then any qualifier, logically, would have to be foregone, and we lose the special protection under law for ethnicity, religion, age, sexual orientation, and so forth.

On the other hand, our nation started out with the written guarantee that all are equal under the law. Yet over our history we have had to legislate specifics because certain classes of people weren’t treated equally despite the law. Affirmative action was enacted just for this purpose, to make things unequal under the law until people would behave more equally. But to end any special provisions before widespread discrimination is eliminated in effect allows us to discriminate again. Legal protections are removed before social protections are common by this Court ruling. The goal wasn’t accomplished before the objectives were abandoned.

I’ve heard the term ‘colorblind’ used often in reporting about this Supreme Court decision. The term is a reference to the Constitution’s lack of any distinction between races, classes, sexes, and so forth. Again, in theory this concept has merit but in practice it doesn’t attain the ideal. Bill Clinton used the word ‘colorblind’ to describe an ideal where the color of skin didn’t matter. However, he used it in a culture where ‘normal’ means ‘white’. After much study in diversity and listening to the experiences of many people of color I realize that most white people – myself included, until I studied it and became aware – have no idea that they hold racist standards. In this context a proclamation of colorblindness means a devaluation of anything other than white standards and practices.

Another difference between theory and reality is that predominantly black schools tend to exist in areas with a lower tax base and therefore have less money for education. Try as we might, and allowing that there will be excellent teachers in any school district despite pay, the average quality of education in lower-income areas is simply less than that in high-income areas. Until we equalize pay on average between blacks and whites, the quality of education will vary between blacks and whites.

So we’ll go back to ‘separate but equal’ until the composition of the Supreme Court changes again. It took fifty years for the conservatives to reverse Brown vs. Board, and it may take another fifty years before we are able to progress back to what we had just a couple of years ago.

It saddens me that some people have to put others at a disadvantage in order to feel like they’re in control. Bullying is rather immature. Putting others down in order to build oneself up is rather insecure. If the United States wants to maintain an image to the rest of the world that we’re ahead of the pack and leading into the future, we should really shoot for more mature actions.