News Emperic Brown vs Board of Education
posted by on July 3 at 11:08 AM
I:
The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs: “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a [racially] integrated school system.” Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
II:
Without attempting in these cases to set forth all the interests a school district might assert, it suffices to note that our prior cases, in evaluating the use of racial classifications in the school context, have recognized two interests that qualify as compelling. The first is the compelling interest of remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination. See Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467, 494 (1992). Yet the Seattle public schools have not shown that they were ever segregated by law, and were not subject to court-ordered desegregation decrees.page 12
In briefing and argument before this Court, Seattle contends that its use of race helps to reduce racial concentration in schools and to ensure that racially concentrated housing patterns do not prevent nonwhite students from having access to the most desirable schools.page 17
Accepting racial balancing as a compelling state interest would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society, contrary to our repeated recognition that “[a]t the heart of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection lies the simple command that the Government must treat citizens as individuals, not as simply components of a racial, religious, sexual or national class.”… Allowing racial balancing as a compelling end in itself would “effectively assur[e] that race will always be relevant in American life, and that the ‘ultimate goal’ of ‘eliminating entirely from governmental decisionmaking such irrelevant factors as a human being’s race’ will never be achieved.” … An interest “linked to nothing other than proportional representation of various races … would support indefinite use of racial classifications, employed first to obtain the appropriate mixture of racial views and then to ensure that the [program] continues to reflect that mixture.” Metro Broadcasting, supra, at 614 (O’Connor, J., dissenting). The validity of our concern that racial balancing has “no logical stopping point,” … As the districts’ demographics shift, so too will their definition of racial diversity.Page 22-23 All from PARENTS INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS v. SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1 ET AL [PDF]
III:
The complete documentary is called A Girl Like Me.
Tip of the hat to the greatest social science experiment of the 20th Century.
That is just heartbreaking.
As important as this work undoubtedly is, the greatest social science experiment of the 20th century was the Milgram Experiment which showed that almost all people will torture others under orders from an authority figure:
"I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."
- Stanley Milgram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The youTube clip reminds of a nasty sounding new film with Robin Williams and John Krasinski. The picture in the review I read showed "boy-next-door Office guy" with dolls simulating infants. Apparently covert people in the film use remote control to make the dolls poop, pee, vomit, etc. Other stupid, IMO, plotlines are included in the review. Yet another example of modern social science edutaining this Greatest country of ours.
That is so sad.
Great post, Jonathan.
Levislade #1 - My words exactly
The only thing this case achieved a 5-4 majority on was the use of race as a tie-breaker, the assigning of slots in contention, with the slot going to the person of the "right" race.
You'll notice that absent from any of the "discussion" of this case going on in the liberal side of the blogosphere is any freaking mention of what the case was about. Using race to achieve diversity is still legal and should be; allowing race to be the tipping factor in assigning premium and near-by schools is not, and shouldn't be.
torrentprime:
the Parents Involved v. Seattle Schools ruling is about more than the practice of using race as a tie-breaker. Regarding your statement, "using race to achieve diversity is still legal" - there is no other way to achieve [racial] diversity than by consciously and thoughtfully developing programs that identify racial inequalities and attempting to remedy them. You CANNOT achieve diversity without race, and it is misguided to think that this ruling has not crippled the pursuit of equality in education (and elsewhere).
As a white kid who graduated from the Seattle public school system, and yet wasn't able to get into several schools because of this tie-breaker, I am not bitter. In fact, I vehemently believe it is selfish to challenge something that was working to eliminate racial inequality in a city that has virtually no racial diversity. The problem here is not that the school district implemented a racial tie-breaker, but that white parents (and students) thought themselves entitled to challenge something that was benefiting our community as a whole.
WCR: once again, someone railing against this ruling misrepresents it.
The ruling does NOT bar the use of race in these programs, so those programs are still legal. The only controlling majority in the SCOTUS decision was that race may not be used as a tie-breaker.
The dramatic difference between quality of high schools in Seattle correlates obviously with race. This should shock us, but we mostly ignore it because there is a lack of political will and financial resources to do anything. The inclusion of increasing racial diversity for schools as a tie breaker for competition for spots at selected schools was a tiny, futile, quixotic policy effort impact this. BUT even this tiny bit is too much for the defenders of patriotic racial privilege.
God has created imbalance and inequality and the SCOTUS believes it is following God's will by striking down laws and policies that interfere with that will.
facts:
1) the SCOTUS decision was based largely on the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically on equal protection.
2) White parents from Magnolia and Queen Anne were the Plaintiffs in this matter.
End result = Plaintiffs are granted equal protection. Meaning, in day-to-day terms, that their 16 year old kids get to drive their Tauregs only 7 minutes to school across the Ballard bridge instead of 15 to the U-District.
And meaning, in big picture terms, that the majority of our Supreme Court thinks racial inequality is a thing of the past.
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