The Irony Of Brown V. Board Of Education
By La Shawn Barber (05/24/04)
Ominous-sounding headlines like "The Return of Segregation" and "School Districts Resegregating" imply that all is not well in America. The 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) has come and gone, but Brown-inspired social engineering lives on.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) established government-sanctioned segregation, and Brown, however wrongly decided, declared it illegal. Instead of allowing integration to occur at its own pace, however (it would have occurred), liberals set out to radically change America overnight in pursuit of a classless, crime-free, 100 percent equal, racially-mixed utopia.
The experiment failed. By refusing to take into account free enterprise, the existence of evil, differences in personal drive, ability, work ethic and motivation, legitimate resistance to government coercion, and that nagging constitutional right called freedom of association, social engineers used the courts to try and force their idealist vision.
Chief Justice Earl Warren knew America was changing and that it was only a matter of time before the Court was faced with more cases like Brown. But that was only the beginning of a long line of decisions in which judges essentially disregarded laws and wrote new ones to achieve an America that exists only in the Court's collective mind.
"With all deliberate speed" was the order issued to schools to desegregate in Brown II, a case heard a little over a year later. But progress was slow. By 1964, 98 percent of Southern black children were still in totally segregated schools. The enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 helped speed up things, but the levels of integration liberals wanted to achieve remained stubbornly elusive.
Beginning in 1968, the Supreme Court authorized one of the worst social experiments since Massachusetts legalized homosexual "marriage": forced busing. Without a single vote by the people, the Court imposed unconstitutional policies in search of its "racially-balanced" fantasyland. Racial quotas would now be used to create this balance.
The law of unintended consequences was on full display as whites fled government-run schools in droves, leaving black students in predominately black schools. Urban schools began to decay as community tax bases shrank. At one point black students were being bused from their neighborhoods to predominately black schools across town! Even more ridiculous, hundreds of school districts across America are still under desegregation court orders.
Liberals expected parents--black and white--to meekly play along as academic standards dropped and discipline problems rose. People exercised the rights they had left and moved to the suburbs or put their children in private and parochial schools. That is the legacy of Brown.
Noticeably absent from the anniversary hoopla was a serious discussion about the wide achievement gap that persists between black and white students. Writer John McWhorter and others point to a culture of anti-intellectualism in the black community. In Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, McWhorter contends that too many blacks choose to embrace a set of counterproductive values and distorted notions of "cultural blackness." They follow this pattern through life, blaming racism for everything and romanticizing ghetto life.
But the liberal media prefers stories about how society has failed blacks, not how blacks have failed themselves. When segregation was the law of the land, black educational standards were higher, families were stronger, and illegitimacy and crime rates were lower. Today, educational standards for blacks have dropped, the illegitimacy rate is 70 percent and even higher in some inner-cities.
Eighty-five percent of black children living in poverty reside in female-headed households, and the black crime rate is high. In 2000, blacks were over 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide and 6 times more likely to be murdered. From 1976-2000, 94 percent of black victims were killed by other blacks. Something other than racism is going on.
The irony of Brown is that while it ended government-sanctioned discrimination in public schools, the government still sanctions discrimination in public schools. Race preferences are not only repugnant to the Constitution, but the Supreme Court's endorsement of this insidious practice smells like "separate but equal." Ignoring history dooms us to repeat it.
Welcome back, Plessy.
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