The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from a 3–2 decision of the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that allowed the city of Lynn to use race in approving, or disapproving, requests for transfer to another school.
Chester Darling, one of the lawyers who represented the students, said Lynn’s policy is discriminatory because it uses race to prevent some children from going to the school of their choice.
“The school doesn’t teach you anything just because they sit you down beside a person of a different color,” he said. “This is assigning small children on the basis of their race alone, the color of their skin. You define people by who they are, not their color.”
The students represented in the suit are of all different races — black, white, Latino and biracial. They argued that factors beyond race should be considered, such as socio-economic status, family structure and language spoken at home.
Lynn’s policy makes exceptions for uniting siblings or transfers of students identified as “multiracial.”
This “multiracial” exception is fascinating — aren’t we all “multiracial”? — but I don’t have time to go into it now. This denial of school choice — usually by, and certainly defended by, people who are all for “choice” in certain other areas — on the basis of race is one of the nastiest and most invidious effects of the new worship of “diversity.”
Courts have been ruling against this peculiar form of racism with some frequency of late. I say these polices are racist because of cases such as the one I wrote about here from Montgomery County, Maryland, a rich and “progressive” suburb of Washington, D.C., where:
the school board prevented two Asian-American kindergartners from transferring to a one-of-a-kind county French immersion program because of their race. According to a Washington Post article,
The parents of Eleanor Glewwe and Hana Maruyama had sought to enroll the girls in a French immersion program at Maryvale Elementary School in Rockville. But school officials denied their requests, saying their departure from Takoma Park would further deplete the number of Asian students there. [Sept. 14, 1995, p. A1]
One of the parents told the board that there were no more Asians in the school where her daughter wanted to transfer than there were where she was enrolled and thus that allowing her to transfer would not have any negative impact on diversity. Paul L. Vance, the Superintendent, replied to the board, according to the WPost, “that nothing in the school system’s policy permits ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ by hurting the diversity of one school to help it at another.” [Sept. 1, 1995, p. B1]. Public outcry eventually caused the board to relent.
In that same post I discussed something even more bizarre that Montgomery County did to the Korean-born adopted son of the American (Jewish) writer Ted Gup, forcing that poor kid to stay in a school that offered him only a choice of a Spanish immersion program or an English program where the preponderance of other students came from homes where English was not spoken.
These children were all reduced to “hostages of diversity,” in effect drafted by the state to provide the other children in their schools whatever benefit derives from being exposed to one more Asian-American (though Gup wrote that he “couldn’t help but wonder what cultural contribution my son could make — he was just five months old when he left Korea.”)
These obnoxious policies have been invalidated by the Supreme Court of California (see here) and by the Fourth Circuit, in two cases discussed here. One of those Fourth Circuit cases, Eisenberg v. Montgomery County, F.3d 123 [4th Cir. 1999], cert. denied, 529 U.S. 1019 [2000]), contains a nice bit of irony (I’m fond of irony this week). As I wrote in the discussion of Eisenberg linked just above,
Revealingly, the county argued that [its race-based transfer policy] wasn’t discriminatory because it was common practice to deny transfers for racial reasons to students of all races when the requested transfer would have a negative “impact on diversity.” The Fourth Circuit disagreed, saying that a policy did not cease to be racially discriminatory simply because it was practiced against all races.
The irony, of course, is that the argument that it’s not discrimination if the policy applies equally to all races is precisely the argument the commonwealth of Virginia used to defend its obnoxious, racist law against racial intermarriage, overturned by the Supremes in Loving v. Virginia, 388 US 1 (1967).
Actually, now that I think about it, since both the racist school transfer policies and the racist anti-miscegenation laws both regard individuals as nothing more than vessels of their racial identity and then override personal choice based on their racial identity, there may be nothing ironical at all about both of these arguments appearing in the same jurisdiction.
The schools in the blue, progressive northeast now have permission to do what schools in Virginia and Maryland do not. According to Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly, who defended Lynn’s racial assignment policy in court, that policy
It stems from common sense. The goal is to prepare children for the world they live and work in.
Sadly, Reilly may be right. As long as people like the school administrators in Lynn and Montgomery County and “diversity” officers in corporations and universities continue to shuffle, hire, fire, and admit individuals based on their race, “the world [we] live and work in” will continue to make us slaves to our racial identities.
