The Supreme Court recently handed down two rulings [1] [2] [3]regarding using racial quotas to determine school enrollment. The court ruled 5-4 with a conservative majority that the use of race to determine where students are enrolled in a school district is unconstitutional. Despite the fact that it may be an unpopular ruling, I am definitely in favor of it.

This interpretation [4] of the ruling essentially sums up most of my reasons for supporting the ruling. In both cases, the programs were designed purely to racially integrate, but did not address the subtlties of racial integration. Particularly, in the Seattle case the students were divided into “white” and “non-white” while in Louisville they were divided into “black” and “non-black”.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the ruling

…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.

This quote seems to embody what is wrong with many of these programs. What Stevens is insinuating is that by enforcing racial quotas at schools, this achieves diversity. In my experience, groups tend to be self-segregating, even at integrated schools. There are always cliques and groups in high school that do not associate with each other, and if these are divided along racial lines (which in my observation frequently happens) then the entire program is merely segregating school by school rather than in large blocks. Such programs assume that because the demographics look good then everything is good. They ignore the underlying causes of racial inequity.

Do I know the underlying causes? I have come to the conclusion that what gets confused for “racism” is actually “class discrimination”, and that black communities in many areas tend to be poorer than their white counterparts. However, I have nothing but my own anecdotal observations to base this upon, and I think the subject warrants more study. Of course, nobody will study this, because the foregone conclusion is that the ultimate source is blind racism when there may be other causes. I believe I discussed that in an  earlier blog entry.

Ultimately, we cannot move forward as a society until race is no longer an issue at all. By this I mean that society, as a whole, at no point ponders who is what ethnicity. We have not gotten over the race issue until nobody ever has to list their ethnicity on an official document, and nobody even ponders the issue. This will not be achieved by requiring schools be “diverse”, but by understanding why it is still an issue fifty years after schools were integrated. It should be clear to anyone that four generations of students have come and gone from our public schools, and yet this is still a problem; integration of public schools put some duct tape over the problem, but nobody has bothered to come along, pull the duct tape off, and provide a genuine fix. Until society stops putting more tape over the issue, there can be no real progress.