Fellows and Fellow Travelers:
This is very important, a significant reversal of Brown vs. Board of Ed.
This response is from the organization founded by Gary Delgado, with whom we
worked last summer. Peter
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The Applied Research Center is dismayed by today's decision from the United
States Supreme Court to overturn lower court rulings allowing the districts of
Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky to use race in making school
assignments. This decision is especially disappointing, given that the majority
of the Court affirmed race as an important factor to consider in educational
equity and school integration. For more than half a century, the moral compass
of 1954's Brown v. Board of Education has guided our nation toward integration
and equal treatment. The Court's conservative bloc has led us backwards.
The 5-4 decision included Justices Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, said that schools
should use factors other than race to achieve racial inclusion. Roberts wrote:
"[In Brown] it was not the inequality of facilities but the fact of legally
separating children based on race on which the Court relied to find a
constitutional violation."
This is a disingenuous use of Brown against desegregation efforts. As they were
50 years ago, racial segregation and unequal facilities remain closely linked.
In California, for example, a state that ranks number one in school segregation
among Blacks and Latinos, 75 percent of high school seniors of color will not
complete the courses they need to enroll in the state's public colleges.
Brown has been relentlessly attacked by its opponents for five decades. As they
worked to repeal and rewrite the mandate through constant legal and legislative
challenges, segregation has been on the rise. Schools are now more segregated
than they were 30 years ago. The need for race-explicit integration programs is
as urgent now as ever.
We appreciate the dissenting opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote
that the majority opinion "reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion. In
doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional
principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and
local governments to deal effectively with the growing resegregation of public
schools, it threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of
race-related litigation." We also note that Justice Anthony Kennedy, although
he joined the majority, validated the idea that race can be a factor if used
narrowly to ensure integrated schools.
Racial segregation in schools results from discrimination against people of
color in housing and employment. Sharply divided living and working conditions
produce similarly divided educational systems. It is folly to accept the
majority's assertion that a situation created through highly calculated social
engineering can somehow be reversed through spontaneous individual choices
about where to send one's child to school.
The strength of Brown was its insistence on explicitly confronting race as a
critical factor shaping access to quality education. The conservative justices
have corroded this critical tool. Although the nation's highest court may be
divided on this issue, communities, school administrators, and elected
officials must rededicate themselves to addressing the discriminatory policies
that continue to leave students of color separate and unequal.
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To learn more, check out these back stories in ColorLines about education and
segregation:
"The Future of Brown"
Victor Goode looks at how in the aftermath of Brown, our metropolitan school
districts have not only remained segregated, they have also become
concentrations of urban poverty.
http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=52
"Reading, Writing, Race and Resegregation: 45 Years After Brown v. Board of
Education"
Current racial segregation surpasses that which existed before the landmark
Brown decision that supposedly outlawed "separate but equal" schooling, writes
Libero Della Piana in 1999.
http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=107
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_______________________________________________
Mellon Myers Undegraduate Fellowship Program at Macalester (http://macmmuf.org)
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