The Supremes Take On The Board Of Education

Oh, boy. Here we go.

--The US Supreme Court will step into a political minefield of race on Monday when it hears two cases testing the constitutionality of public school integration.

The cases – in which primarily white parents are challenging school desegregation programmes in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington – could set historic new guidelines for how and when race can be used to integrate America’s rapidly resegregating schools.--

I don't have kids, and even if I did, they wouldn't attend public schools, because we live in a horribly species-ist society. But I find the debate about "racial balancing" of public schools interesting anyway, because it proves one axiom of human nature:

You can't make people do what they don't want to.

The seventies were spent bussing white kids all across hell's half acre, and STILL the white families found numerous ways to keep their kids out of predominantly minority schools. Talk about a failed social experiment. No matter what you do, short of telling white folks that they're not allowed to send their kids to private school and not allowed to move, White Flight is going to happen.

There ARE ways of enticing whites to remain in their current neighborhoods, or agree to having their kids bussed to far-away mostly minority schools. But that would involve implementing school choice, and thus competition. And the same people who don't mind putting other people's kids on a school bus for three hours a day, would rather be ass-raped with a saguaro than allow any meaningful form of school choice.

And why do the do-gooders want to ground White Flight anyway?

--Scores of civil rights and academic organisations are lobbying the Supreme Court to uphold the Louisville and Seattle racial-balancing plans, arguing that integrated education improves the academic performance of minority students, and yields other less easily quantifiable benefits such as better race relations and less tension in the workforce.--

That's nice. What about the white students who perform poorly academically because when they're sent to a predominantly minority school, they spend a good part of their day being dangled out the bathroom window by their ankles?

This article, along with talking about the various protests going on outside the Supreme Court while they hear the case, also provides a very simple and condensed explanation of the purpose of the policies.

--The school policies in contention are designed to keep schools from segregating along the same lines as neighborhoods. In Seattle, only high school students are affected. Louisville's plan applies systemwide.--

Um, don't most home-buyers with kids consider which neighborhood school their crotch-dumplings will be attending to be, like, practically the most important consideration when they decide where to buy? I think if I were them, I'd be righteously pissed if I'd taken on a huge mortgage and usurious property taxes, only to be told my sproggie wasn't the right color to go to the coveted neighborhood school.

Clearly it's time for me to put my "I'm a simple moose" hat on again. If I was one of the Supremes, this would be a no-brainer. If a school can't turn someone away for being too black or too brown, then by god, they shouldn't be able to turn someone away for being too white.

Maybe it's time to stop parsing everything out by race, and just agree that we all like to masturbate, and that no one in this discussion has any evil intent.

Good luck, Supremes. Please decide this one way or the other. Namby-pamby solutions aren't solutions at all.