AP: Inapt and Inept

Inapt

1. not apt or fitting.

2. without aptitude or capacity

Inept

1. without skill or aptitude for a particular task or assignment; maladroit….

2. generally awkward or clumsy; haplessly incompetent.

3. inappropriate; unsuitable; out of place.

An Associated Press article today, “High Court Probes K-12 School Diversity,” is both inapt and inept in its misuse of the term “diversity.”

The article says the two cases (from Louisville and Seattle) “could prove among the most significant K-12 desegregation cases since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that banned racial segregation in public schools,” even though the Seattle schools have never been segregated.

Moreover, and in some regards more significant, the article repeatedly states that these cases are about “diversity,” even though the facts in the record from Seattle make that claim, well, both inapt and inept.

Seattle is a multiracial city, with not only blacks and whites but many varieties of Hispanics and perhaps even more varieties of Asians and Pacific Islanders. For purposes of school assignment, however, the Seattle school board lumped all students into two bins, one white and one non-white. As the amicus brief from the Center for Indiviual Rights (discussed here) notes on p. 5:

Non-Whites are lumped together into a single group characterized solely by not being White and stripped of any consideration of their separate ethnic and racial characters. Further, the district applies its system only to oversubscribed high schools, denying elementary, middle, and undersubscribed high schools any of the purported benefits of diversity provided through racial balancing. The system is essentially arbitrary, targeting racial percentages around existing population figures rather than any theory about what proportion of various races are needed to attain the benefits of racial balancing.

As Terence Pell of the Center for Individual Rights has just noted,

That means … that a school with equal numbers of white, black, Hispanic, Asian American and Native American students would not be considered racially balanced because of the goal that each school must have a white population of at least 25 percent.

Facts such as the above reveal clearly (as if such revelation were still needed) the hollowness of the euphemistic appeal to “diversity in the classroom” of such experts as Ellis Cose (yes, the same Ellis Cose criticized at such length here) who was quoted in the AP article as follows:

The new cases “put on the table, in a very clear way, the question of how far society, how far government, should go in terms of trying to promote diversity in education in America,” said Ellis Cose, the author of a study on affirmative action.

“The core issue of whether the government should be in the business of helping to promote diversity in some way in education is at the heart of all these cases,” he said.

On the contrary, what these cases put on the table “in a very real way” is naked racial balancing, and thus the real issues they raise is whether the Court will reverse its long-standing rule that racial balancing for its own sake is unconstitutional. As Hans Bader has forcefully pointed out (quoted here):

the Supreme Court rejected the idea that racial imbalances make a school system segregated in cases such as Freeman v. Pitts (1992). Indeed, the Grutter decision … amici rely on cites Freeman v. Pitts for the proposition that “racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 330 (2003), citing Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 494 (1992).

The claim that Seattle’s schools are segregated “rests upon the ‘completely unrealistic’ assumption that” students of each racial group should be represented in each school “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 507 (1989).

Assigning students to schools by race in Seattle has about as much to do with promoting diversity, or even “diversity,” as Alabama’s former assigning students to schools by race had to do with avoiding diversity. Seattle wants what Alabama did not, “racial balance,” but both desires have nothing to do with “diversity.”

Say What? (4)

  1. anonymous December 3, 2006 at 4:33 pm | | Reply

    John,

    I think you are using “segregation” in a different sense than is the newspaper. If you view segregation as only de jure segregation, then you are absolutely right. However if you include de facto segregation then the paper’s usage is correct. Whether the government ought to oppose de facto segregation is a separate issue.

  2. John Rosenberg December 3, 2006 at 5:51 pm | | Reply

    Anon – Indeed I am using it in a different sense, but I don’t believe there is any sense in which the public schools of Seattle could be said to be segregated, or ever to have been segregated, so I don’t believe it makes sense to speak of “desegregating” them, even with the “de facto” definition in mind.

  3. David Nieporent December 4, 2006 at 4:57 am | | Reply

    Anonymous:

    But regardless of how you “use” the word, the fact is that Brown was not about “racial balance.” It was not about “diversity.” It was about actual racial discrimination.

    In other words, it was about de jure segregation, not “de facto” segregation. So regardless of what the Constitution requires or what good racial policy is, the fact is, this case is not about whether to accept or repudiate Brown.

  4. Brian December 4, 2006 at 2:58 pm | | Reply

    The Seattle approach also reveals (again) that despite what diversity means in most situations, in “diversity” situations “diversity” is a dichotomous variable with categories of white and non-white.

Say What?