High Court to rule on Legality of Affirmative Action
At what point does the state have an interest in deciding who attends what school based on race? Affirmative Action is a failed social engineering project whose time has come and gone. Craig Martelle of Strategic Outlook has the same view: “I am an opponent of Affirmative Action - its useful time is well past and at this point, it is discriminatory because the content of one’s character is not as big a factor as the color of one’s skin.” The Supreme Court has maneuvered itself into the fray long ago with the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Ks. In that ruling the court rightly reversed another landmark ruling in Plessy v. Fergusson which instituted ‘Separate but Equal’ stating it was okay for blacks and whites to have separate facilities as long as they were equal. In reality, the facilities were neither separate nor equal.
Unfortunately the outcome of the Brown case led to the massive bussing of white students in mostly white schools to mostly black schools and vice versa. Apparently busing was considered an option because of a shortsighted belief that it was white kids who make a school better. All it did was bus white students to poor schools and black students to poor schools. This was NOT the intention of our founding fathers when they encouraged communities to build area schools. This was a time when children walked to their schools, where parents went worked in unison with their children’s teachers to educate the kids, and it was a time when teachers and parents were neighbors working towards the same goals. The Brown ruling reversed almost 200 years of neighborhood schools or rather it was how the lower courts construed the Brown case. This lower court ruling which allowed busing was a blight on the American consciousness and, in my opinion, set back race relations for years. One remedy would have been to equalize funding between white and black schools. When the educational and monetary discrepancies between the two group equalized, they would begin to integrate on their own. Forcing blacks and whites together only made tensions higher.
Since then the High Court has attempted to focus and narrow what constitutes discrimination and how to make Affirmative Action more palatable to the American people. With the Bakke decision the Supreme Court intervened in the University of California Medical School at Davis. Again they intervened in a Michigan Case in which Sandra Day O’Connor writing for the majority ruled that race could be used in admissions as long as it is only one of several factors. I might note here that in my opinion, the Michigan case was wrongly decided. Racial discrimination is racial discrimination no matter what the color of the one affected.
Now the US Supreme Court has a chance to make things right. At issue are two cases, one in Seattle and one in Kentucky. In the first, the Seattle schools system allows students to pick which schools they wish to attend with the only caveat being the schools rely on tie breakers including race to decide who goes where. This is wrong. Does the school district use such factors as social class and gender in their determinations instead of just race. Probably not.
The second case from Kentucky is also troubling.
The court also will also consider a school desegregation policy in Kentucky. That case is somewhat different, because the school district had long been under a federal court decree to end segregation in its schools. After the decree ended, the district in 2001 began using a plan that includes race guidelines.
A federal judge had said system did not require quotas, and that other factors were considered including geographic boundaries and special programs.
Craig at Strategic Outlook pretty much sums up how I feel on these Affirmative Action cases before the Supreme Court where the very legality of Affirmative Action is at stake. As I said earlier, discrimination is discrimination, no matter what the color of the individual.
We need no more victims. We need people to make good of themselves, just as the NAACP’s president has done. And when the Supreme Court hears the cases from Kentucky and Wasthington, I think you’ll see that any public school concessions regarding skin color, violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution. This will be the first step in removing race barriers and getting that much closer to true equality.
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