I have written a number of times about the Supremes recent decision to consider cases from Seattle and Louisville, where local school boards want to be allowed to continue assigning students to schools on the basis of their race. (Isn’t that what local schools boards in Kansas and South Carolina did and wanted to continue doing, until the Supremes told them No in Brown v. Board of Education? Oh, never mind….) For those discussions, see here, here, here, here, and here.
Now comes Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute who has filed an amicus brief supporting the challenge to those racial assignment policies. It is an excellent brief, and worth reading in its entirety. Not surprisingly, I find the legal argument compelling, but even more interesting is the utter offensiveness of the Seattle school board’s justification for its racial assignments, a justification that rejects even the value, the ideal, of a colorblind society root and branch.
On its Equity and Race Relations web site, the Seattle School District, until June 2006, declared that “cultural racism” includes the following:
“emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology”;
“having a future time orientation” (planning ahead); and
“defining one form of English as standard.”
In addition, the web site declared that only whites can be racists, and that minorities cannot be racist towards each other. And it derided the concept of “equality” as an outmoded aspect of assimilation. (Assimilation in turn was disparaged as the “giving up” of one’s culture).
After these definitions became the subject of extensive media attention, the School District withdrew the page that contained them from its web site on June 1, alleging a need to “provide more context to readers” about “institutional racism.” In its place, the School District inserted a web page that criticizes the very idea of a “melting pot” and being “colorblind,” emphasizing that the district’s “intention is not . . . to continue unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.”
Although Seattle mouths the mantra of “diversity,” its own stated positions are rigidly intolerant. As Bader writes in the CEI brief,
anyone who prizes “individualism,” whether she is a civil libertarian, an entrepreneur, or a free market conservative, is guilty of “cultural racism” under its definition.
Such views do not deserve judicial or any other kind of deference. They deserve denunciation and derision.
