Let the Dream Begin
February 9, 2007
Later this year, the Supreme Court could cut through the lies and confusion around the use of racial preferences in school admissions. Its decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education will, it is hoped, vindicate the rights of schoolchildren denied admission to public schools in order to preserve racial balances.
Supporters of the Seattle and Jefferson County admission programs have raised arguments to defend the continued use of race. They are dead wrong.
First, claims that “resegregation” of public schools will occur without race-based preferences are based on the premise that any racial “imbalance” in a school is legal segregation.
In 1954, Brown v. Board ended the fiction that segregation was justified as long as “equal” schools were provided for disfavored races. That landmark decision forced all schools to admit children irrespective of race. Busing plans were implemented to ensure that schools, predominantly white, or predominantly non-white, would genuinely receive equal resource allocations. The driving principle was the Fourteenth Amendment mandate that schoolchildren, and all Americans, could not be treated differently because of race. Supporters of racial preferences actually want to segregate children in the eyes of the law.
While some studies have suggested that minority students’ performance improves in racially diverse classrooms, both the premises behind the studies and the conclusions are suspect. For starters, a conclusion that minority students and black students in particular, cannot learn effectively outside the presence of white students is intuitively illogical, patronizing and racist.
If such studies are being done by people like Dean Christopher Edley at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, who recently proudly announced the creation of a center to do research to support the use of racial preferences, I would question both the accuracy as well as the intellectual integrity of the results. Where I come from, ‘research” done to support a predetermined conclusion is called “propaganda.”
Even assuming such studies contain kernels of truth, we must still ask exactly who benefits and who is burdened by racial preference programs, and, is the burden fairly borne? In the public schools arena, the burden of racial classification is always disproportionately borne by poor families who do not have the means to send their kids to private schools or to move to the suburbs. Thus, poor Asian Americans are disproportionately burdened by racial preference programs, an inconvenient fact that makes claims by certain liberal activists that racial preferences somehow benefit poor Asian Americans ring particularly hollow.
It is ironic that racial preference supporters have raised some arguments used unsuccessfully in Brown. In particular, they argue that “diversity” programs utilizing racial preference should be preserved because they are popular with many local parents, and represent determinations by locally elected school officials as to what is best for everyone.
The reason the Brown decision was necessary was precisely because local, popularly elected leaders did not support equal access for all races. If popular support and the decisions of locally elected demagogues were a legitimate basis for law and public policy, the Supreme Court would have sent Linda Brown back to her segregated school in Topeka, Kansas. Fortunately, what matters is whether the school districts’ imposition of racial classification violates the Constitutional rights of the specific children who are negatively affected.
Finally, some argue that use of racial preferences teaches racial harmony by forcing children from different backgrounds to mix. I would submit that telling children that their skin color has an impact on their opportunities in life sends an extremely poor message and teaches a terrible lesson.
I speak from personal experience. I attended Lowell High School in San Francisco at a time when Chinese American children were kept out of using some of the very same arguments advanced in the Seattle and Jefferson County cases. In the name of racial balancing, Asian American students with straight As whose parents were dishwashers could be rejected in favor of students from “underrepresented” groups with B, Cs or worse, whose parents were doctors.
Just as the doctrine of “separate but equal” was firmly repudiated in 1954, I am confident that the principle of “different but equal” underlying racial preference programs of the present will also end up in history’s dustbin. If we are fortunate, the Supreme Court will soon take an important step in moving the dream of genuine racial equality forward.
Lee Cheng is an attorney and a co-founder of the Asian American Legal Foundation. E-mail him at lchcheng@netzero.com
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