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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2007'Brown' no moreBy John Alan On the last day of its 2006-07 term the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision that banned race-based integration of public schools. This decision has come 53 years after the court unanimously outlawed school segregation, in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. which mandated race integration of schools "with all deliberate speed." PERSISTENCE OF SEGREGATION In the years since Brown, some schools are integrated, but many have remained segregated. In an ironic twist of logic, the Supreme Court now has declared that in order not to discriminate based on race, one must become race-blind. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, whites make up 58% of the nation's public school enrollment. African Americans, who are 17% of all students, are going to schools that are 53% Black. The new mandated race-blindness taken to its logical conclusion would prevent even collecting such data. The U.S. Supreme Court did not present a single rational reason why it needed to disrupt efforts to integrate races in the public schools. The need for this integration is an old problem that will not go away by saying that the "United States Constitution is color blind." Though the U.S. was supposedly founded on the abstract equality that declared "All men are created equal," the inequality of color was part of U.S. law from the start, including the Constitution that referred to slaves, who had no rights, as three-fifths of a person. The Constitutional Convention raised the issue of whether Blacks were property or humans, but the southern delegates won the day by declarating they were definitely property in their realms. The Civil War arose out of this contradiction and only solved one manifestation of it, outright slavery, leaving a mountain of other forms of racism. The ensuing 14th Amendment only formally instituted equal protection of law and full citizenship for Blacks. CENTURY OF STRUGGLE It took nearly a century of struggle on the ground before the courts addressed the need for school integration, which was just one remedy to help open up U.S. society to full participation of Blacks. The Civil Rights Movement's struggle for concrete freedoms on the ground gave abstract legalism some content. Civil rights and legal equality, which the Supreme Court showed can be turned into its opposite through making them only an abstraction, is all that a capitalist society can offer. As Marx put it, we need a movement that doesn't stop at civil rights and continues on to full human emancipation. At the time of the bicentennial celebration of the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall made the following magnificent attack on all the false and hypocritical hoopla: "I do not find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government...They could not have imagined, nor would they have accepted, that the document they were drafting would one day be construed by a Supreme Court to which had been appointed a woman and the descendant of an African slave. 'We the people' no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of 'liberty,' 'justice,' and 'equality,' and who strived to better them." |
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