BrianGarst.com

The Supreme Court has been on a roll lately. This time they’ve correctly ruled that west coast liberals assigning students to schools according to race do so unconstitutionally.

The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen?discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.

. . .Although remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test, see Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467 , that interest is not involved here because the Seattle schools were never segregated by law nor subject to court-ordered desegregation, and the desegregation decree to which the Jefferson County schools were previously subject has been dissolved.

The left often justifies their institutionally condoned racism with the claim that they are just correcting for past racism. They now make this argument so reflexively, that they don’t even bother to determine if there is any history of past racism to which they can possibly be referring. Indeed, they instinctively refer to any racial imbalance as “segregation”, but in so doing they lose the meaning of the word. Even the supposedly intelligent liberals on the Supreme Court can’t understand this basic distinction. Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, sets them straight.

Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, the dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of race—, an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S 483 (1954). This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. The Constitution and our cases require us to be much more demanding before permitting local school boards to make decisions based on race.

. . .The dissent repeatedly claims that the school districts are threatened with resegregation and that they will succumb to that threat if these plans are declared unconstitutional. It also argues that these plans can be justified as part of the school boards’ attempts to “eradicate earlier school segregation.” . . Contrary to the dissent’s rhetoric, neither of these school districts is threatened with resegregation, and neither is constitutionally compelled or permitted to undertake race-based remediation. Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Because this Court has authorized and required race-based remedial measures to address de jure segregation, it is important to define segregation clearly and to distinguish it from racial imbalance. In the context of public schooling, segregation is the deliberate operation of a school system to “carry out a governmental policy to  separate pupils in schools solely on the basis of race.” . . In Brown, this Court declared that segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racial imbalance is the failure of a school district’s individual schools to match or approximate the demographic makeup of the student population at large. . . Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial imbalance might result from past de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also result from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices. Because racial imbalance is not inevitably linked to unconstitutional segregation, it is not unconstitutional in and of itself.

The use of racial imbalance by liberals to justify their social engineering programs is no longer acceptable. It is time they accept that observing such an imbalance does not constitute evidence of racism.

race issues