The Way I See It
By Joseph C. Phillips

New Jack Affirmative Action

Fifty years ago one thousand armed national guardsmen escorted 9 Black Little Rock, Arkansas teenagers through an angry mob to the doors of Central High School.  No doubt Ernest Green, Melba Beals and the rest of the Little Rock 9 did not face a mob screaming for their blood in order to promote cross-racial understanding.  On the contrary, their acts of bravery were an indictment of the prevailing notion that race was a sufficient rung on which to hang individual rights. 

It is a testament to how far we have strayed from the original aims of affirmative action and school desegregation that two cases currently before the Supreme Court -- Crystal Meredith v Jefferson County Board of Education and its companion case Community Schools v Seattle School District – are more concerned with the need for diversity than they are the remediation of past discrimination.  Francis Mellon, the lead attorney for the respondents in Meredith, is not shy in proclaiming that the aims of the [Jefferson county] school board are to “ameliorate racial stereotypes and promote cross-racial understanding.”

The Jefferson County School district operates something called “managed choice.”  Parents are offered a choice from a cluster of schools.  If they choose a school outside of their cluster admission is based on several criteria one of which is race.  In order to maintain a racial mix that reflects the community the district has determined that no school should have less than 15% or more than 50% non-white enrollment.  Meredith is white and although there were seats available in the school she chose the school had already reached its limit of white students so her son was denied admission.

Neither the Jefferson County School District nor the Seattle School district argues that de facto segregation results in inferior education for some students.  As a matter of fact they specifically argue that there is no qualitative difference between the schools in their districts.  Once the legal barriers to discrimination have been laid what then is the states interest in racial percentages? The school districts argue that the educational benefits of diversity justify race conscious enrollment criteria. 

Diversity may be a noble aim, and you will not find me arguing against cross racial understanding.  However, I am not aware of any credible study demonstrating that diversity leads to Black students becoming stronger readers or white students becoming more competent in math.

Yet the diversity mantra continues.

But are schools with a predominately nonwhite enrollment inferior because they are not sufficiently diverse?  Is that the road we want to travel down?  There are a myriad of reasons that so many inner city schools fail our children;  lack of parental involvement and a lax approach to discipline and curriculum to name a few. However, racial imbalance is not one of them.  The logic is also given the lie when one considers that many of the brighter lights in these communities are schools with very little racial (not to mention gender)diversity -- often times by design.

Moreover, as admirable a goal as is mutual respect, is teaching it really the purview of public schools?  And do schools that fall below a racial percentage set by the local school board teach it any less well than schools deemed sufficiently diverse?  Of course not!  Given the results of some of the recent scholastic assessments perhaps the schools should spend more time on math and English and leave brotherly love to families, churches and the Boy Scouts.

We allow our desire for diversity to override the rights of individuals at our peril.  It is worth remembering the lesson taught us 50 years ago by the Little Rock 9.  Those brave young people did not walk a gauntlet with armed escort to trumpet the virtue of diversity but rather to decry the evil of discrimination based on race.

Send me your ways of seeing it at Josephcp@netlistings.com