In several of this week’s rulings, we’re just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg. The until now somewhat disguised reactionary majority on the court appears to be showing its true colors.

Dr. Anthony J. Becker, Jr., at 11:55 am EDT on June 28, 2007

not the end of the world, folks

Oh, so the Supreme Court’s ruling that passengers in cars can challenge the legality of the stop, and that the process provided to a possibly mentally-ill person was unconstitutional is reactionary?

I really wish people would read these opinions before talking.

And really, are completely-raced-based decisions necessary?

Larry, at 1:15 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Race based decisions

Good for the court. No good evidence exists that diversity in the classroom does anyone any good; the traditionally black universities obviously don’t value it highly and even think it can be harmful; and these educators think nothing of putting little kids on busses for up to 10 hours per week and creating a more stressful class setting based on their fantasy of what is good for us.

School vouchers would likely lead to more voluntary integration and better classroom outcomes.

BHTPHD, at 1:45 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Diversity is Crucial

Diversity is crucial to an expanded and expansive learning environment. The conservative Supreme Court is now doing what they blamed the liberal/moderate Court of doing: Activism for their political ideals.This is a depressing day for all students, parents, teachers, and institutions of learning.

Robert Summers, Instructor at Otis College of Art, at 2:25 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

why it helps to read the opinion

Since I have been told that academically generally do not consider it appropriate to read the texts that they comment on, I should note that since the decision is 5-4, and Justice Kennedy does not concur with large parts of the plurality’s decision, his concurrence makes a number of important points, starting on p. 91 (which is p. 7 of his opinion):

1) To the extent the plurality opin-ion suggests the Constitution mandates that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo ofTo the extent the plurality opinion suggests the Constitution mandates that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools, it is, in my view, profoundly mistaken.

2) If school authorities are concerned that the student-body compositions of certain schools interfere with the objective of offering an equal educational opportunity to all of their students, they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem in a general way and without treating each student in different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.

3) School boards may pursue the goal of bringing together students of diverse backgrounds and races through other means, including strategic site selection of new schools;drawing attendance zones with general recognition of the demographics of neighborhoods; allocating resources forspecial programs; recruiting students and faculty in a targeted fashion; and tracking enrollments, performance, and other statistics by race.

Finally, Kennedy shows how this case might be a lot more limited: Each respondent has asserted that its assignment of individual students by race is permissible because there is no other way to avoid racial isolation in the school districts. Yet, as explained, each has failed to provide the support necessary for that proposition.

The extent to which Kennedy’s view is binding on lower courts remains to be seen. Because Kennedy does not endorse a number of things the plurality says, then the plurality cannot be seen as gaining the support of the court.

Larry, at 2:55 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

The decision today ruled only against the race-based formula in the Lexington and Seattle school systems. Justice Kennedy (the 5th vote) specifically went against the majority decision saying that race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity. Lots of school districts will use that to either continue to consider race as part of an overall formula or to attempt to insert race as one criteria. Like the Bong Hits case earlier this week, which seemed determined to say that free speech was still alive in public schools just not in this circumstance, this case seems to be saying that race can be used just not the way these cities used it. Of course, this will lead to all sorts of lawsuits against schools that attempt to insert race as part of the formula and lower courts will do what they always do which is to use Supreme Court decisions to support whichever side of the race fence tyhey want to come down on.

Patrick Mattimore, Behind the headlines, at 3:10 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Discrimination and Integration

It seems to me that the plurality writes for a world that doesn’t exist; that is one without serious ongoing racial discrimination. Yet study after study reveals that when whites and blacks apply for the same jobs with identical formal credentials whites are far more likely to be called for interviews than blacks. Even a “black” name on a resume hurts tremendously and in one study whites with criminal records did better when applying for unskilled jobs than blacks with no records. Similarly when audit studies test whether blacks and whites are treated similarly when they seek to rent or buy homes, they find time after time that blacks are not shown places or are told places are unavailable which are offered to whites.

Beyond all this, I highly value an integrated society and think increased segregation coupled with increased inequality is a formula for racial hostility and perhaps interracial violence. Depending on how Kennedy’s opinion is interpreted, this case could be, as I understand Bryer suggested, a disaster.

Rick

Richard Lempert, at 4:20 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Diversity

Tom: The fact that you found 25 articles praising diversity is a feat in itself. I tend to think that most polls, tests, etc. having anything to do with diversity or race are lies; people are afraid to speak the truth even anonymously to a pollster. More accurate are articles recently printed in the NYTimes such as the following:

What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”If diversity were such a good and noble thing, people would not need to be coereced into accepting it nor would it be necessary to pass laws to enforce it. As it is, people vote with their feet, feel most comfortable with their own kind and do everything to avoid it.

DG, at 4:50 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Hey Larry I was not neccessarily complaining so why dont you bit me!! So my crudentials are were not perfect but still pretty high. It is discrimination against white people....black people easily get full ride scholarships to college with credentials way below many who dont get a dime’s worth of help! Your right life is not fair but this is unjust. By the way i work my ass off...I put myself through college and have managed to accepted in to dental school so dont tell me to work harder, everyone is entitled to an opinion and I did not trash yours so dont make this into something stupid and dont try to call me out.

K.L, at 5:10 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Cautious Optimism

Larry and Patrick’s comments above are both right. The opinion that matters here is Justice Kennedy’s. Kennedy’s opinion said the following:

1) The Seattle and Louisville programs are unconstitutional.

2) BUT, diversity still remains an important goal and school districts can use race-conscious means to achieve that goal.

3) There are many methods which are conscious of race but do not explicitly assign individual students based on race that are permissible.

This is a much narrower decision than people are letting on. For more analysis, see http://scintegration.blogspot.com/

Vanessa, at 8:25 pm EDT on June 28, 2007

Anecdote on Diversity

I am teaching a class in evidence when the O.J. Simpson trial is ongoing. I continually refer to what is happening in it as it illustrates numerous points we are discussing in class in a context that has everyone’s interest. Had my class been all white almost everyone would have thought O.J. guilty and discussion would most likely have presupposed this. Had my class been almostg all black most would have thought O.J. innocent with similar effect. The class is mainly white, but I have 10-15 black students. There is a diversity of views. Most importantly, not only are there a few whites who think O.J. innocent, but I also have enough black students to have some who think O.J. guilty. The latter validate white guilty views and help free them for discussion. Also the minority of innocent leaning whites and guilty leaning blacks mean that no one can attribute differences simply to racial solidarity or biases. I think diversity meant the discussion and learning expereince were better for all concerned.

But the Supteme Court cases are not just about diversity; indeed to my mind they have or should have little if anything to do with the educational value of diversity. Rather they have to do with the kind of society and world we want to achieve. Do we want an integrated society in which people’s horizons are exapanded by meeting people from very different backgrounds from an early age. Or do we want early childhood to be a time in which more people will associate largely if not entirely with people of their own race. The integrated society is not always the easiest one to live in. Tensions between racial groups can arise, particularly among children, which would not exist if the races were separate. But also the personal relationships that cross these lines and break tensions would not exist. What’s so very wrong with the Supeme Court plurality is the failure to recognize these values. These were not affirmative action cases. No one was giving people benefits (that some might think they did not qualify for) because of their race. Rather they were integrating the schools, which is, among other things, a way of helping to ensure that children of different races will have equal resources allocated to their education, an equality which doesn’t seem to exist when some schools are largely if not entirely white and others largely if not entirely black. There also seem to have been few complaints about the efforts these cities were making to integrate beyond the litigants, no doubt recruited to bring these suits. Rather we had two communities proud of what they were doing to promote a more equal and integrated society. This is what the plurality of the Court and the opinion itself are wlling to undermine. Make no mistake about it; these cases do not derive from Brown and the cases that followed; rather it contradicts what these true civil rights cases aimed at. It, along with a number of other recently divided decisions, indicates a Court majority that is radically activist — willing if not anxious to govern from the bench — despite the espousal by the so-called conservatives of strict constructionism.

Rick, at 4:35 am EDT on June 29, 2007

RWH, One of the beauties of American law is that it is fairly transparent. The downside to this is that it means that if one is to meaningfully participate in it, one needs to do a fair amount of reading. The same cannot be said for business, the military, or even science. Yet, somehow, American academics think that they can get away with reading a summary (usually written by the loser) of a legal dispute, but will routinely castigate their students for not reading something in their discipline.

In general I don’t really care one way or the other about AA, except to note that white people that complain about it tend to annoy me.

As to reading amicus briefs, I have a couple different views on them. In general, it isn’t too hard to read them, because they are deliberately written to be readable. Up until a couple of years ago, amicus briefs were rarely coordinated (even if they claimed to be), so they did not actually address different points. Now, it is a fair bet, that each amicus brief will address a different topic. But, whatever the case, I don’t really ask that you read amicus briefs.

Rick, The some white people presumed OJ to be guilty is that they 1) had no faith in the American system of justice; and 2) based their opinions on stuff they saw on TV. I am white, and I never ran around saying “he is guilty.” As to whether society should be integrated, I don’t know for sure. As to whether the constitution requires integration (or just equal rights), this is a far more nuanced issue, which is precisely what the opinion addressed, and has been contently debated in the courts pre and post-Brown. It is somewhat disingenuous to think that nobody was given a “benefit” in these school cases, because many urban public schools are not acceptable places to send children of the middle class. So, whoever gets to send their kid to a good school gets something.

KL, I must decline to take you up on your offer to “bit” after I suggested that you stop complaining about black kids getting into the good schools. White people get scholarships, too. Maybe if you actually worked really hard you would have gotten one. However, whenever I talk to one of these white people it turns out that they watched TV or drank in high school, so, in my mind, they just were not serious in the first place. Congratulations on being accepted to dental school. Maybe when you graduate you can practice in an economically depressed white area, and clean the teeth of hillbillies.

Larru, at 7:40 am EDT on June 29, 2007

Research

Hi all,

First, thanks everyone for trying to keep the tenor of the discussion respectful. I appreciate people who challenge others, but do it in a way that allows conversation.

DG, thanks for the points you made. I would encourage you to check out Anthony Antonio’s qual/quan longitudinal study at UCLA (2001, 2004). His work looks at only one campus, but shows that on such a heterogeneous campus, students form primarily heterogenous inter-racial friendship groups. Something like between 83% and 70% of the students self-reported multi-racial friends in their dating, dining, study groups and social lives. Antonio found that a campus as diverse as UCLA doesn’t experience segregation that you (DG) suggest. In fact, white students who do segregate themselves (in terms of close friends), experience positive learning outcomes from simply being in a diverse environment. Interesting stuff.

-Tom

Tom, at 10:00 am EDT on June 29, 2007

Would anybody care to offer up a cogent working definition of the word/term “diversity?” In most sciences definition of terms is crucial. Not so much for social sciences, I’ll admit, but generally that’s the case. Let’s put it in the shape of D = X, and you can make X as complex as you like, as long as it definitively describes D.

Now then, do you achieve D by taking a small subset of the subsets of a total population in school #1 and bussing that subset to school #2 (and vice versa)? Let’s say a mix of 100 people (50 and 50, okay?) out of the socially definable subsets of 300 people in a minority subset and 400 people from a majority subset from the larger whole population of 700 people. Do the 250 non-bussed people remaining in the socially definable minority subset at school #1 then magically attain the same “D” benefits that the 100 bussed people do? What about the 350 in the majority subset? Can diversity, whatever it is, be imported and exported? Does that really happen? Maybe so, because after all to ideally balance things out a mix of 100 people from school #2 get bussed in to school #1 with their ostensibly different “D"-weighted value, thus adding their own diversity to school #1. So both schools get loaded up with diversity, right? I realize I’m making a binary argument here, and that in reality there are many more than simply two subsets of socially definable people in most schools.

But what was “diversity” again??? I forget, exactly. Maybe people can help me out here. Is it a numerically defined concept? Can you achieve it by moving people around like pieces on a chessboard until you have achieved some sort of percentage or ratio that is more or less consistent across the grid? Is there a “critical mass” of diversity, above which lots of good things happen and below which things just sort of fail to happen? Does it logically follow that, sans a critical mass of diversity, these “good things,” whatever they are, CANNOT happen?

Like the concept of Phlogiston, diversity can be alleged to be responsible for all sorts of catalytic effects if you don’t bother to actually define what the term means. It wasn’t defined in Grutter. It wasn’t defined in this latest court case, either.

Somebody float me a definition. Thanks!

Ray, at 12:15 pm EDT on June 29, 2007

Definition of diversity

Very well said, Rick, and I agree with you. But I also think there needs to be a standard definition of diversity that applies to all educational systems and associated programs, departments, policies and procedures that deal with or even mention “diversity” in their statements, titles, organizational objectives, or general policies. As it is, the concept of “diversity” is regionalized, and I don’t think that’s good enough. The actual DEFINITION of diversity should not be diverse, or variable. It just leads to too many potential disagreements, litigation, etc. That’s likely what’s going to happen as a result of this current S.C. decision.

As an example of what I’m talking about, the need for a standardized definition, let’s construct a hypothetical scene involving the support of regionalized definitions of diversity, as explained by a bus driver:

Bus Driver: What IS your problem, lady? You’re already ON the bus. You already get to go wherever the bus goes, and as you can plainly see (gestures down the length of the bus) we have established diversity already, in our regionalized fashion. You’re looking right AT diversity, as we see it locally. Quit making such a fuss over nothing. And if you don’t like our local definition of diversity, by all means, go somewhere else where it’s defined in a manner that suits you.Rosa Parks: Your local definition of diversity, sir, is an insufficiency. It falls short of the full meaning. And it should mean the same thing anywhere and everywhere in this country. I should be able to define it equally well anywhere I happen to be, and that definition should affect me personally in exactly the same way no matter where I happen to be in this country.

In this little scene above “diversity” is taken not in the sense of inclusion or exclusion, but rather in the sense of parity, which is well within the definition of diversity. Parity does not mean personal equality, though, nor should it. It means equality of status or functional equivalence. In other words, the mere fact that blacks and whites are on the same bus (in the same educational facility) does not necessarily ensure that “diversity” has been achieved. So the definition of “diversity” is not a simple one. In the case of school bussing, simply moving the chess pieces around the grid via big yellow diesel transports does not necessarily ensure that “diversity” will be achieved, unless your definition of “diversity” is so narrow and limited as to mean only numerical groupings.

The answer, I think, is to improve the educational infrastructure to the point where there’s not such a wide variation in performance, facilities, qualification of personnel, etc. from institution to institution. That would require very big bucks, of course, and where would we get that? Darned if I know. We spend a couple of billion a week on George’s little dust-up overseas, but of course THAT’s important. Imagine what an additional two billion a week, every week, would do towards making “divesity” issues irrelevant in public education.

Ray, at 4:00 pm EDT on June 29, 2007

As an ACTUAL college student and an AFRICAN AMERICAN who is on a RACE BASED scholarship, I feel that it is crucial that these scholarships remain... If they weren’t in effect, there would be very few African Americans in college (or any other race for that matter). Historically Black Colleges/Universities were created because our race wasn’t allowed or accepted into the other schools. It has history and that’s why they remain to this day. However, while they are predominately black (like my University is predominately white)Other races get scholarships to get into those schools also. So what is the argument here? IT’s easy to say we are diverse by our opinions and religions, but the biggest symbolism of diversity is race and culture. I wouldn’t want my children to sit in a class room with only blacks, only whites, only asians or only hispanics. I want them all to be included in that class room... That’s the only way one can truly be well rounded! My experience here in college, including all of the diversity that surronds me has turned me into who I am and actually prepared me for the real world filled with real people. It saddens me to hear things like this. It’s setting the U.S. back several steps because inequalities continue to remain. I fear for the day when it’s time for my children to attend any type of school.

Courtney, at 5:50 pm EDT on July 13, 2007