Brown v. Board of Ed. is dead. Long live racial integration.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Chief Justice John Roberts insists that the Supreme Court did not overturn the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling from 1954, but, honestly, what else are we to make of the Court's 5-4 decision "striking down voluntary integration plans in the public schools of Seattle and Louisville," as Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog puts it? (See also the Post.)

I tend to be liberal on issues of race, that is, against race-oriented public policy, but Roberts's assertion that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" seems to me to be hopelessly naive. Racial discrimination is not the product of race-oriented, or racialist, public policy. Racial discrimination may or may not be worsened by any given racialist public policy, and racial discrimination ought to be avoided in public policy, but racial discrimination in a more general sense antedates public policy. There is racial segregation not necessarily because racial groups have been legally segregated but because of a complexity of factors including racism itself, the grouping of people by race according to primacy afforded racial identity. And how is such racial segregation to be overcome other than through efforts -- as here, voluntary efforts -- at integration? Do Roberts et al., the Court's right-wing majority (with Kennedy), suppose that the best thing to do is simply to wait -- for eons -- for race and racial (self-)identification to be overcome?

The Times is right, in its editorialization. This is "Resegration Now": "The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality."

Pre-Brown America, here we come.

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For more, see Amanda Marcotte, Scott Lemieux, Taylor Marsh, Jack Balkin, and Christy Hardin Smith.