supreme court seattle ruling

So the Supreme Court decided yesterday that it is unconstitutional to assign students to schools based on race unless the purpose is to undo a history of forced racial segregation. I'd like to ask John Roberts what constitutes a history of forced racial segregation.

There are those who think that institutional racism doesn't exist and never has existed in Seattle, since it's not in the South and doesn't have a large population of African-Americans. There are also those who want to skirt around the issue of racism and sometimes these people argue – as several prominent Seattle journalists did this morning on NPR's Weekday Edition – that integration by socio-economic status is the way to go. I agree wholeheartedly that economic disparity is an excellent way to integrate, but it is not the only way, because it ignores the entire issue of race.

As dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: "The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown."

Do I think the Seattle program really worked to effectively end discrimination in schools and provide equal opportunity to all 46,000 kids in the district? No. But it was something, as former Superintendent Joe Olchefske noted in an interview today (in the Seattle Times).

It is better to have done something to work toward equality than to not try anything and ignore the disparities so obviously around you (simply walk the halls at a Rainier Beach and then go walk them at Ballard). As with so many other issues, Seattleites wish to stick their heads in the sand and hope it all goes away.

It's not simply going to go away. This issue, which is really a civil rights issue, has not been solved. I thought about Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation today, and the interview he does with Congressman Joe Lewis, who worked with Martin Luther King and who has fought tirelessly for civil rights throughout his lifetime. Congressman Lewis told Kozol:

"A segregated education in America is unacceptable. Integration is, still remains, the goal worth fighting for. You should be fighting for it. We should be fighting for it. It is something that is good unto itself, apart from all the other arguments that can be made. This nation needs to be a family, and a family sits down for its dinner at a table, and we all deserve a place together at that table. And our children deserve to have a place together in their schools and classrooms, and they need to have that opportunity while they're still children, while they're in those years of innocence.

You cannot deviate from this. You have to say, some things are good and right unto themselves. No matter what the current mood in Washington is like, no matter what the people who are setting policy today believe, or want us to believe, no matter what the sense of temporary hopelessness that many of us often feel, we cannot give up on the struggle we began and on the dream that brought us here." (pages 316-317.)