BlackPerspective.net

In a 5 to 4 vote on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school diversity practices in Seattle and Louisville. You can read about the case and the decision here.

To me the greater issue here is not this specific case because a particular form a diversity plan takes could be unconstitutional, and for me to comment on that we’d need to explore the specifics in depth. The greater issue to me is the reasoning given by Chief Justice John G. Roberts and his 3 consigners; and the implications thereof.

Chief Justice Roberts

Justice Anthony Kennedy while voting to strike down this particular practice actually dissented against Robert’s reasoning; highlighting some salient points.

First this summary commentary from the article: “Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race.”

The notion of that statement is most patently absurd. How can you achieve racial inclusion without acknowledging race? It’s outright impossible. If this commentary is a correct representation of this ruling, then the right-wing agenda to end affirmative action has largely been realized; at least in regards to affirmative action in education.

Further, the opinion put forth by Roberts and his 3 cosigners Thomas, Scalia and Alito; basically overrules and ends Brown v. the Board of Education. The affront to Brown can further be seen as the article continues, “Chief Justice Roberts said such programs were “directed only to racial balance, pure and simple,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.” This contradicts the Brown ruling which recognized racial balance; as “separate but equal” was declared inherently unequal.

Justice Kennedy

Kennedy makes these points in his dissent, describing Roberts decision as “all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account”. The article further points out that “Justice Kennedy said achieving racial diversity, “avoiding racial isolation” and addressing “the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling” were “compelling interests” that a school district could constitutionally pursue as long as it did so through programs that were sufficiently “narrowly tailored.”

You can hear an audio report on Kennedy’s decent on NPR here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.