***Scroll down for clarification***
Last week the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that schools in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington, could not use race as a tiebreaker when assigning students.
Although Justice Clarence Thomas is vilified by black liberals, he has a keener understanding of “black pride” than they have. Unlike white liberals, Justice Thomas believes black children can excel in predominantly black schools and don’t need to mix with whites in order to learn. So-called progressive blacks have bought into the white supremacist notion that black children must share classrooms with white children to be educated. They completely miss the irony of their own self-loathing, practically begging whites to allow their children to sit alongside theirs.
The true meaning of “black pride” has been lost.
I’m always — always — embarrassed whenever I hear a black person convinced of his own “high” intelligence arguing that the government should force whites to live around blacks, send their kids to school with blacks, and hire underqualified blacks. It’s as though the civil rights, “black pride” movement never happened. People fought and died, bled and cried to dismantle a government system that forced racial segregation. Decades later, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are fighting and crying to keep in place a government system that forces racial integration because we poor black folks can’t do a thing for ourselves without white folks around.
If blacks like Clarence Thomas and myself were pushing that line of crap, the slurs “Uncle Tom” and “Aunt Jemima” would be apt. But we’re saying the opposite. Black liberals are the ones begging white people to “accept” them. At the same time, black liberals are the ones raising their kids to believe this country, the greatest on the planet, is a cesspool of white racism and that white people are bound and determined to keep them down. Why the heck would you want to be around people you think are trying to keep you down?
Contrary to what some of you have been taught, Americans have a right to live wherever they want and avoid whomever they want for whatever reason. Private businesses have a right to hire whomever they want and avoid hiring whomever they want for whatever reason. It’s shocking to some people and might hurt black people’s feelings, but it is not illegal to want to be with certain people based on race or to avoid certain people based on race. We have the freedom to self-segregate, and the government does not have the authority, constitutionally or otherwise, to order people around to achieve some arbitrary racial balance (or imbalance, as was the case with Jim Crow). It didn’t have that authority in the days of Plessy v. Ferguson, and it doesn’t have that authority now.
For a lesson in true — as opposed to phony — black pride, read Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District et al (PDF).
For a standard recitation of white liberal paternalism, read Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent. “The White Man’s Burden,” indeed.
Update: In case anyone has trouble spotting the issue in this post, allow me to be explicit: I’m not demeaning the idea of “black pride” in itself; I’m demeaning black liberals’ idea of black pride. Those are two very different things.
Monday, July 2 @ 9:00 a.m.: Check out my latest Townhall column, Black Pride, White Paternalism.
Juan Williams, author of Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It (I reviewed his book here), has an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education.”
An excerpt:
“In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation…Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?”
Justice Marshall’s answer is surprising.
Monday, July 2 @ 7:49 p.m.: Although I understand what Juan Williams is trying to say in this article — that racial integration in government schools might not be all it’s cracked up to be — the principle behind it is very much alive and should remain so: the government should not mandate or sanction segregation/discrimination by race in government schools. In other words, even if certain schools end up primarily black or primarily white because of residential patterns, the government should not have the power discriminate against people based on race or prefer certain races to “balance” schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) was supposed to put an end to that power. It states in part (emphases added):
“Desegregation” means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but “desegregation” shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.
That is the principle of Brown v. Board of Education embodied in the CRA. How much clearer can it be?
If private individuals want to create racially exclusive schools (or hire certain people based on race), that’s their right as private business owners. We have freedom of association in this country, and that freedom includes (or should include) providing services to whomever we want to provide services. But the government must stay out of the skin color business.
Tuesday, July 3: Or to put it another way: “What [Brown] ordered was the removal of laws and policies prohibiting racially mixed schools. The principle it upheld was nondiscrimination — which would often (but not always) lead to racial integration.
…
“The real educational problems faced by minority kids today are not lack of white students to sit by but inadequate choice, lack of order, a shortage of good teachers and families who don’t make a priority of learning. Most parents, given a choice between racially balanced schools and safe, sound schools, would unhesitatingly choose the latter.”
Related posts:
- Juan Williams, Scared Leftists, Etc.
- Juan Williams, White Minority at UC, Etc.
- Education, the Global Economy, and You
- Super Post for Super Tuesday of Equality
- Dred Scott and the “Legacy of Slavery”
- Repeating History
And op-eds:
