Nick Blesch of Twilight of the Idols calls our attention to an all too typical case of judge-approved racial discrimination right here in River City, which is to say in Postville, Allamakee County, Iowa.
The Des Moines Register has an article today about a recent decision of the Allamakee County District Court upholding the Postville school board’s denial of transfer requests from two white students. The Board had based its refusal “on the district’s year-old voluntary desegregation plan that limits the number of white students who can leave Postville, where one in five students belongs to a minority group.”
Voluntary? Indeed, in a smug comment that could have come from Humpty Dumpty (“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass), Superintendent David Strudthoff rejoiced that
[w]e can now fully implement our voluntary desegregation plan. This will help us maintain our English-speaking population and help assimilate our non-English speaking children as they come into our district.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the article, however, is not the Humpty Dumpterian doublespeak but the Register‘s view that the most newsworthy aspect of this decision was not its approval of racial discrimination but the fact that this sort of discrimination had spread from the city to the countryside.
The decision in a Postville case is unusual because in the past, only urban school districts such as Des Moines and Waterloo had been allowed to deny transfers based on the need to maintain racial balance in the school district. But the issue is arising in several smaller Iowa cities as employers such as packing plants have drawn large numbers of immigrants to town.
State officials said the ruling could open the door for other districts to follow Postville’s lead, and the West Liberty superintendent said her district would take similar action.
I suppose that once all the white students in the entire state are forbidden to transfer the “desegregation” plan will then be 100% voluntary.
