Rigid Racial Balance At Risk?

The New York Times has a long article today lamenting the fact that what can only be described as a rigid racial balance plan (that’s why I so described it) in White Plains may be at risk because of the Supreme Court’s recent decision barring racial school assignments in Seattle and Louisville.

As in most cities, housing in White Plains, the Westchester County seat that has sprouted skyscrapers among its suburban patches, is identifiable by race. The southern end is dappled with tree-shaded homes inhabited mostly by white families, while the northwest has housing projects populated by black families and aging apartments crowded with Latinos.

Under a strict neighborhood zoning plan, children of those northwestern black and Hispanic families would be assigned to the Post Road School, but so would children from adjoining middle-class white enclaves, and it is not clear how many would attend if they were reduced to a tiny minority….

In 1989, White Plains, tired of perennially gerrymandering for racial balance, began a “controlled choice” plan that essentially jettisoned neighborhood zones and required each school to have the same proportions of blacks, Hispanics and “others,” a term that includes whites and Asians. The plan allowed for a discrepancy among schools of only 5 percent. Similar plans had been adopted in Cambridge and Fall River, Mass., and copied by Milwaukee, San Jose, Calif., and dozens of other cities.

This strict racial balancing plans seems clearly to have been dictated by a fear that some “others” would opt out of the public schools if “they were reduced to a tiny minority” in their neighborhood school. There is an “unspoken assumption,” the article states (speaks out loud), “that white parents [what happened to the “others”? – jsr] will send their children to public schools only up to a murky ‘tipping point.’” In addition, there are also fears among the well-to-do “others” who live on the south end’s streets “dappled with tree-shaded homes” that their school “would be stripped of the ethnic palette that residents have long prized.” Horrors.

Three days ago, as most readers will recall (there may be some of you with memories like mine, i.e, that don’t go back that far), I posted a long discussion (here) of the distorted memory — and in the case of some law professors, analysis — of the arguments counsel for the various plaintiffs made in Brown v. Board of Education. With the arguments for and against segregation fresh in my mind, reading today about the palpable fear (at least at the New York Times) that the denizens of tree-dappled White Plains (and its plainer neighborhoods) might be forced by the evil courts to forego the pleasures of rigid racial balancing reminded me of my own youth in segregated schools in Alabama, both before and after Brown.

The argument today (and yes, it was an argument, despite appearing in the news and not editorial pages) is that communities should be allowed to engineer strict racial balance in the schools in order to prevent whites/“others” (albeit maybe only “a tiny minority”) from leaving. Funny, but I don’t recall in the aftermath of Brown hearing similar arguments that discrimination should be dismantled very slowly in order to keep whites (no “others” back then) in the public schools. (That argument was made to the courts in the cases that became Brown, but it was made by those who defended preserving an “ethnic palette” that was considerably more monochromatic than the one beloved of White Plains’ southenders.) Nor do I remember the New York Times editorializing (or writing news articles, though I repeat myself) lamenting the exodus of Southern whites from public schools after school prayers were banned.

But then, I’ve already mentioned that my memory’s not what it used to be.