August 7, 2007
Debating the Viability of School Integration
The Practising Law Institute recently held a series of panels on the completed Supreme Court term. During the discussion on the school-integration cases, the New York University professor Derrick Bell asked why liberals remain so romantically attached to the idea of integration. (Bell made a similar point in an essay for The Chronicle Review.)
Michael Dorf has some ideas. "Liberals value integration as a good in itself because liberals, like conservatives, value color-blindness, albeit in a different sense. Conservatives believe that GOVERNMENT decision-makers should always or almost always be color-blind in the sense that government should not make decisions that turn on race. Liberals believe that INDIVIDUALS should be color-blind but see ubiquitous evidence that they are not." And liberals "see the harms that result from numerous individual private race-based decisions as worse than the harms that result from race-based decisions by the government to remedy these private decisions."
As Dorf, a professor of law at Columbia University, acknowledges, that answers only half of Bell's question about why liberals cling to integration. "I think the best answer is simply that many of us believe that Bell -- who writes about the 'permanence of racism' -- is unduly pessimistic. ... So while Bell and others are right to pursue whatever methods of education that work within de facto segregated schools, we conventional liberals are also entitled to think that it's too early to give up on the goals of integration."
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Tuesday August 7, 2007 | PermalinkComments
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Integration did not produce positive results. It polarized groups in American society. Let the parents choose the course of action for their children. Government or courts have no business in telling the parents where to send their children.
— Kan Chandras Aug 8, 12:21 AM #
The problem for Liberals is that, in spite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, they believe that utopia can be produced by government force.
Liberals will NEVER admit that their icons and milestone legislation (Kennedy, MLK Jr., the Warren Court – school integration, Title VII, Title IX etc.) have produced nothing but clogged courts, reverse discrimination, increased bitterness among and between groups, and government impotence.
To admit to those realities would be tantamount to admitting their secular progressive agenda is neither secular or progressive: it’s goofy, dangerous and as much a religion as Islam.
I believe Liberals intend to do good. They just haven’t accepted the fact that their definition of “good” contradicts the realities of reason, education, sense, fairness, and practicality when it comes to school choice.
— Muap Conners Aug 8, 07:23 AM #