by Joe Buffaloe
Daily Lobo columnist
It feels like 1954 all over again.
The Supreme Court is hearing a case this week against Seattle public schools. The issue? Racial integration.
Seattle, along with Louisville, Ky., has a policy in which high schools seek a student population reflecting the city's overall racial demographics. Under its Open Choice program, rather than automatically attend the closest high school to their homes, some students are placed in another high school to even out the numbers.
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The plaintiffs are angry that some students don't have a choice when it comes to participating in this system, which means being placed in schools they didn't request. If they win the case, school districts across the country will be forced to discontinue many programs that ensure diversity in public schools. Such programs have been implemented in the years since the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, because, although mandatory segregation has been outlawed, many schools have remained as racially homogenous as ever.
Then, as now, cities were so segregated in terms of where different races lived that the policy of attending the closest school ensured that whites would not end up sitting in class with minorities. St. Louis public schools were mostly segregated until 1981, when the city introduced a busing policy to place minorities in predominantly white schools and vice versa.
Many districts are now warning that if the Seattle school district loses this case, their schools will again be segregated by race. Worse, they will have no legal way to solve this problem. I guess they'll just cross their fingers and hope the real estate industry will solve our nation's de facto segregation problem.
The argument of the case comes down to whether public schools can legally have a policy that places students at certain schools based on race. The plaintiffs argue that this is discrimination, that schools can have policies that promote diversity without using the language of race. The defendants argue that this is ridiculous - if the goal is racial diversity, they argue, why wouldn't you mention the word "race" in the policy?
For all their legal arguments, I can't see why the plaintiffs would have a problem with Seattle's policy unless they're closet racists - they're out there, in case you haven't noticed, though not all of them are as high-profile as Mel Gibson or Michael Richards of "Seinfeld." Honestly, if they feel they have been harmed by the policy, what would that harm be? That their white children had to go to a school they consider worse? And why would they consider a certain school worse, outside of race, since all schools in the district pay teachers the same and have relatively equal scores on standardized tests?
Long after the abolition of the "separate but equal" doctrine, races in the U.S. are still both separate and unequal in terms of their lot in life. One need only look at incarceration and execution rates, both of which are influenced by poverty more than any other single factor, to see that whites have just plain got it better. If such a disproportionate number of white people were in jail, don't you think the government would do something about it?
I can't remember the last time anyone heard of an all-white housing project in the inner city, either. If so, the government might have paid attention to urban poverty. But as things stand now, our nation is complacent with ignoring true poverty and strife, because rich white males still have all the power, and they don't care.
Reducing the disparity in quality of life between races in the U.S. should be one of our top priorities, but instead, it seems to rank around No. 50, right below who wins the next season of "Dancing with the Stars." And if Seattle loses this case, it could drop even lower.
As the Martin Luther King Jr. monument on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., is getting under way, finally recognizing one of our nation's greatest men as a peer of famous presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, we should all take time to remember that the battle for racial equality is not over. Rather than taking a step backward by shooting down public schools' attempts to bring people together, we should do our best to live up to King's dream of a nation where race is no longer a source of pain, hatred and poverty.
I wish schools didn't have to implement policies like Seattle's. I wish everyone was treated equally in this country, and that all schools lived up to the same quality. But for those wishes to come true, school districts should be allowed to do what's necessary to set things right.
