Eugene Robinson: Standing in the Schoolhouse Door

[deminks]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/28/AR2007062801789.html

It's time for those of us who are old enough to remember when the U.S. Supreme Court was a major force for racial integration and justice to stop living in the past. We need to realize that for the foreseeable future any progress our increasingly diverse country makes toward fairness and equality will come in spite of the nation's highest court, not because of it.

No one should be surprised that the court, as it made clear yesterday, does not consider promoting racial diversity in the nation's public schools to be a particularly worthy goal. No one should be surprised that Chief Justice John Roberts pretends not even to understand the concept: In his majority opinion striking down school integration plans in Seattle and Louisville, Roberts described what the two cities were doing as "racial balancing," even though local officials made clear that their intent was nothing more sinister than racial inclusion.

(snip)

Let's not grasp at straws here. While Kennedy kept the court from definitively shutting the door on school integration, it's clear what direction we're headed. This court would have been perfectly happy for me to go to the "black" high school in my hometown of Orangeburg, S.C., instead of following a handful of pioneers who integrated the "white" school. This court has the whole concept of affirmative action in its sights. Sorry about the whole slavery thing, and the whole Jim Crow thing, and the whole "separate but equal" thing, and, oh yes, the whole racism thing. That was then, and this is now

If we as a society -- black, white, brown, yellow, red -- are going to work toward fairness, inclusion, equality and, yes, integration, we're going to have to do it by working around those dour men in black robes on Capitol Hill. They have decided to stand in the schoolhouse door.

[katmondoo]

1. Americans are going to have to learn to live and work around a lot of

the after effects of 8 years of Bush and Cheney rule. Everything that we were once proud of as Americans is disappearing. The Italians were masters at this. Even during the Nazi takeover they still were able to circumvent and get their way in spite of the harshness of the Nazi retaliation.