I was planning to write this yesterday:
Perversely, it made for a great distraction from immigration: the Supreme Court decision on desegregation managed to get the lefty blogs and media thinkers into high dudgeon, making it easier to ignore any internal dissension on thorny issues of race and immigration. When it comes to minorities and schools we are one.
Well sort of; I had to gut-check my impressions with Mom before writing this. Nothing could get me disowned faster than something that suggests agreement with anything like the majority in Parents vs Seattle School District. And really I don't.
But I do think this decision underlines the need for a new discussion on school integration, just as the Supremes' recent term requires resetting expectations for what aggrieved people can expect from courts.
And my thinking starts with Clarence Thomas.
Yes, you read right.
Don't worry, Thomas is not suddenly my hero. This year marked yet another step in the right's attempt to give Thomas the reputation they think he deserves, as a daring thinker, and not the caricature some people have of him from his brutal confirmation hearings. Exhibit one is Jan Crawford Greenberg's serious reassessment of Thomas.
Personally, I don't buy any of it - I think Thomas will wind up being the Court's most bitter old man, angry for the acceptance and respect he never got, taking it out on those he sees as weak. He will always be marked by that first term dissent on "cruel and unusual punishment" in the case of the shackled prisoner who was beaten, suggesting that it was neither, a willingness to remain unmoved by the suffering of others that is truly eyebrow raising. Thomas is often prised on the right for just such an approach - distant, above-it-all, slightly out of touch.
It's why I think his signed opinion in the Seattle case is so interesting, certainly.
Over time, I've come to the conclusion that the best quality of the Court's most inspiring justices has to do with their writing - the really great decisions are often distinguished not so much by the law they interpret, or the daring conclusions reached, but by the strength of the writer finding a way to make the case. Much lgal writing is nothing of the sort; it is narrow, technical, dense and dull.
So far as we get our first full taste of the Roberts court, one thing that's apparent is we didn't get a couple of great writers with those last couple of picks. Alito's made little impression, and in Seattle, and a few others, Roberts demonstrated a stolid, workmanlike approach to the issues that was thoroughly uninspiring. His Seattle decision (not mention his almost, if not more, incomprehensible lead ruling in the "Bong Hits For Jesus" T-shirt case) drones on and on and decides... well, not much, actually. The controlling opinion doesn't actually have a full majority behind it, as Anthony Kennedy wouldn't sign on to its more absolutist provisions (that no integration could ever be okay if it included race as a criteria).
Indeed, the Court is shaping up to be not quite what it's being sold as: even though it's clearly conservative and limiting, there's a striking lack of unanimity among its supposed majority. They can't seem to resist papering each other with separate opinions that have a "yes, I think we should be as draconian as possible, but here's why my draconian approach is better than yours." While it's clearly not a liberal court - and Anthony Kennedy is no Sandra Day O'Connor - it's also having a hard time bing the conservative court of many a winger's wet dreams.
Which brings me back to Thomas.
It's interesting: Thomas isn't doesn't so much write a concurrence (that takes him all of two sentences), as a long howl at Justice Breyer, assailing the dissent. And Thomas isn't making the narrow, technical case Roberts is (threading his way through previous precedents to prove that this case of racial unfairness isn't like the other ones), because Thomas has no interest in it: he's been opposed to all the affirmative action and diversity plans he's seen, and he's no need to say otherwise.
Thomas makes a case that what's going on in Seattle (and in Jefferson County, Missouri, where the second case in the decision comes from) is about "racial imbalance" rather than "racial segregation" - that, in other words, if the state doesn't have a Jim Crow law mandating separation of the races, we're not talking about state enforced segregation, which was the point of Brown.
And well, sort of, it was. Another tack in this argument came from a rather unexpected essay from Juan Williams, who rarely shows his cards about his own beliefs (since he mainly plays the role of UN Translator of Politics on Fox News Sunday, explaining to Brit Hume and Bill Kristol why they come off as intolerant, no offense intended). Williams, too, argues that Brown was meant to force schools to treat all students fairly, regardless of race... and that it has failed. Towards the end of his essay, he recounts a conversation he had with Thurgood Marshall:
[Marshall's] response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.
If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.
Racial malice is no longer the primary motive in shaping inferior schools for minority children. Many failing big city schools today are operated by black superintendents and mostly black school boards.
I think Thomas and Williams point to a long term frustration many blacks - especially black conservatives - have over the poor state of education for minorities. It has led some blacks, Bill Cosby of course, in addition to Williams and Thomas, to prominently blame a culture in poor minority communities that doesn't value education sufficiently. But Williams undermines his own argument - the malice shown to minority students isn't at the local level, and really never was; it's the next level up where this starts to come into play, as states make funding decisions to cities and counties with formulas that in many states have been shown to be fundamentally imbalanced. One can't help but note that the most damaged school system Williams is probably referring to is the District of Columbia's; but that just sort of underlines how much more oney and attention the State if Maryland puts into the neighboring counties of Montgomery (one of the 5 richest in the country) and Prince George's (the one with tone of the largest successful minority populations in the country)... and then follow that road (i.e. Interstate 95) up to Baltimore City and let's look again at the same thing.
When I first talked about education a while back, I said this whole discussion needed to be nationalized; I still believe that to be the case. Arguably Thomas and Williams are right that we no longer live in the world meant to be addressed by Brown vs Board of Education, and Thank God (and the Court) for that. But the "racially imbalanced" world we do live in is just that much more destructive, because it underlines how ingrained these moves to segregate ourselves in our society actually are, and those self-segregated communities need to be challenged and alternatives need to be tried. If it's not the plans these school districts attempted (which weren't necessarily that great, another point underlined by Roberts dull as dishwater decision) , it does still need to be something. And it may be, as we watch the Supreme Court argue itself into irrelevance, that the real energy to these solutions is elsewhere, in many ways where it belongs: our legislatures, and our executives, Governors and the President.
But the real test of course, is whether I just kissed my inheritance goodbye. :) Any thoughts, Mom?
One note - This post is a little light on links as I post it for the first time. Additional links to come.
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