It’s beginning to seem more and more as though all the major metropolitan dailies have columnists on urban/black issues who don’t know which end is up. Reader Jeff Peterson sends a link to a doozy of an example on the Michigan AA cases in the Detroit Free Press by one Trevor Coleman.
First, there’s the obligatory demonizing of critics of racial preferences, all of whom are of course “arch conservative organizations” or others on “the right” who “are foes of integration and social justice” and oppose what is described as “this modest attempt at racial integration.”
Another familar feature of this particular screed is the Plessy v. Ferguson mongering, i.e., the absurd claim that critics of preferences intend to undermine Brown v. Board of Education.
Plessy v. Ferguson was nullified by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which declared segregation unconstitutional. That’s the decision that U-M’s opponents in the affirmative action case are now aiming at.
These Plessy references are especially misplaced. As I have pointed out before, the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. Thus it is the preferentialists today, not the critics of preferences, who unwittingly echo the Plessy argument.
[…] January 2003: Another familar feature of this particular screed is the Plessy v. Ferguson mongering, i.e., the absurd claim that critics of preferences intend to undermine Brown v. Board of Education…. These Plessy references are especially misplaced. As I have pointed out … , the legal theory underlying the Plessy decision is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not require colorblindness and hence that racial discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence constitutional. Thus it is the preferentialists today, not the critics of preferences, who unwittingly echo the Plessy argument. […]