While we anxiously await the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in two cases in which white parents in Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky, challenged their school districts’ use of racial classifications in determining where children attend school, a practice supposedly outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education, we can keep ourselves busy reading about similar lawsuits.
[Although based on political considerations and a flawed sociological study rather than on legal arguments, Brown nevertheless is the law of the land.]
On September 26, 2006, The Center for Individual Rights (CIR), a right-leaning public interest law firm, which defends civil rights for all, filed suit on behalf of a white high school student named Emily Smith. Download the 14-page complaint (PDF). She applied for and was accepted to a journalism workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University, sponsored by the public university, the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, and the Richmond Times Dispatch.
According to CIR, the offer was rescinded after the program co-director found out Smith was white.
Now, anyone with just a tiny bit of synaptic activity knows this is discrimination based on race. If it’s not obvious to you, imagine that Smith was black and her offer to attend the workshop was rejected because she wasn’t white. We’re constantly told how evil that is, but racial discrimination typically applies only when whites discriminate against non-whites, and not the other way around.
I hope CIR’s challenge to a skin-based program that specifically exclude whites and other “non-minorities” encourages others to file suit and signals the beginning of the end of racially exclusive programs, no matter how noble their raison d’etre.
(Hat tip: Discriminations)
Addendum: It looks like the poorly-managed gravy train has come to a halt (free reg. req.). Competing for clients and earning their business based on your skills and not on your skin…what a novel idea!
