Racial Assignment

Eric Muller, a law prof at the University of North Carolina, has a practice exam question, based on a real practice at his daughter’s elementary school:

Query: may a public school district not under any sort of desegregation order or decree take race into account in assigning students to classrooms in order to achieve the objective of “reducing a sense of isolation?”

Eugene Volokh, who linked to this post, writes that “I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no,’ but the question is more interesting than my answer.”

I think Eugene’s answer is interesting enough, and right, but short. Here are some additional thoughts, more or less random.

• Muller was asking about classroom assignment by race within one school, but it is not much of a stretch to envision situations, probably in rural areas, where it might seem advisable to transport widely scattered minority students to one school, in order to create a “critical mass” who would not feel isolated. Although undertaken for different purposes, something much like this has already been tried. It was called busing, and it didn’t work very well.
• Racial clustering to avoid feelings of isolation would seem to conflict with the goal of diversity. For example, two commenters on Muller’s post mentioned that their law schools clustered all the blacks in the entering class into the same section, thus depriving students in the other sections of whatever benefits derive from “diversity.”
• In a number of public schools, not only in the South, white students are the minority. Should they be clustered together? Should more be bused in if there aren’t enough?
• Should the same approach be taken with Jewish or Muslim students? Are their possible feelings of isolation not worthy of equal consideration? (As the only Jewish student in school in my small Southern town years ago, I fortunately did not feel isolated. But if I had, I’m not sure what the school/school district/county/state could have done about it.)
• What if one of the minority students assigned to a minority-clustered class/school wanted to be assigned elsewhere? Sounds far-fetched, absurd? In fact, in the Fourth Circuit (where Muller’s daughter’s school is located), there are two recent cases, discussed here (it’s a long post; scroll to the “Hostages to Diversity” section), where courts overturned a school’s refusal to allow transfers for racial reasons. In one of the cases two Asian-American students who had asked to transfer to a French immersion program in another school were refused because school officials said “their departure from Takoma Park would further deplete the number of Asian students there,” thereby depriving the other Takoma Park students of the diversity benefit of being exposed to them. (Washington Post, Sept. 14, 1995, p. A1) (A similar case from California is discussed here.)

Taking race into account, even for “benign” reasons, leads to results that are far from benign. Perhaps the most insidious of those results is the undeserved legitimacy it bestows on taking race into account.