Posted on 06/30/2007 12:19:16 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
When I am in California, I enjoy visiting Chinatown, that part of San Francisco dominated by Chinese shops, foods and language. The food is fresh, you can barter at stores, and if you're fluent, you can practice your Chinese. The population in this area is not diverse, but this concentration of Chinese culture is what makes Chinatown so enjoyable – the same with Japantown or any other ethnic area. Yet, the four dissenting justices in the recent Supreme Court decision on race would probably rule that each of these "towns" may contain a maximum of 41 percent of the concentrated ethnicity, and must contain 59 percent "everyone else." That is the logic the four dissenting justices purported in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District.
School districts in Seattle and Louisville both had programs to ensure a racially diverse school population. In fact, the program in Seattle attempted to create schools where 41 percent of students were white and 59 percent were nonwhite. The court struck these programs down. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
Wait, did he say to prevent discrimination one should stop discriminating? What a novel idea.
Both the majority and the minority invoked Brown as its justification. But what did the landmark case really say? Speaking for the schoolchildren he represented, Robert Carter, one of the lawyers who made oral arguments in Brown, said, "We have one fundamental contention, [that] no state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among citizens."
When it comes to racism, liberals correctly deem it atrocious when it leads to discrimination against minorities. But when a policy is racist against white people, the policy is now deemed appropriate "affirmative action."
Regardless of what race you seek to promote or inhibit, making decisions based on the color of someone's skin is racist. People should be awarded based on the merits of their abilities. And at a more fundamental level, people should all be treated equally. This idea is the very core of the Declaration of Independence – that "all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …"
Justice Anthony Kennedy, though he agreed with the majority, wrote a separate opinion to temper Justice Roberts' directness. Justice Kennedy stated that diversity "is a compelling educational goal."
Diversity may be a worthy goal, but simply having people of different skin colors does not guarantee diversity. People of different skin colors can act the same, and people of the same skin color can act differently. Diversity is relates to culture and environment more than race and skin color.
If we follow the idea through, to achieve diversity a school must also have a proper balance of black hair to blond hair and a correct ratio of thick-eyebrowed students to those with thin eyebrows.
This whole decision typifies the difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservative positions are based on principled approaches, while liberal positions are based on pragmatic approaches. The principle here is no decision should be based on race. The conservative justices stuck to this principle, even though it may not lead to schools with equally diverse student bodies. But, because the liberal justices know best, they will hand down whatever decision will best effectuate their omnipotent understanding of racial issues.
I certainly hope the Supreme Court dissenters don't take up the racial equalization of cities and towns.
I won’t support anything like that. I saw a store in the local mall called “Chicano Power,” Put a store out there called black power and no one says anything, but put a store out there called white power and watch all of them start squealing like stuck pigs. Amazing how things work in this country.
Well, it isn’t liberalism anymore, it’s victimism; and it isn’t devoted to justice anymore, but to redress. (And sometimes cross-dress.)
The difference betwen liberals and conservatives, Conservatives can read th 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, liberals can’t. To a liberal, the court only exists as an agent of social change, the law be damned.
Civil rights and the rule of law were advanced light years by this decission. Only the race baiters will tell you otherwise. They seek equal outcome, not equal opportunity.
Judge Roberst Rocks. Now we need Souter to send his resignation letter, soon.
Justice Kennedy stated that diversity “is a compelling educational goal.”
Mr. Justice Kennedy, could you please tell me exactly what diversity is, how it is achieved and how you determine its benefit to education?
Not to mention that he should cite the chapter and verse of the non-living US Constitution where “diversity” is envoked.
“Liberals” are the strangest, most mindless creatures on earth. They love “diversity” and despise “segregation”, but the only reason there’s racial diversity is because of segregation. In fact, the more segregation there is, the more racial diversity there will be.
For most of human history, the fact that travel was difficult allowed diverse human populations to form. Laws and customs encouraged this development, but really it was mostly due simply to logistics. A small mountain range, for example, kept the Spanish and Portuguese separated enough that they developed slightly different cultures, languages, etc. Greater distances and larger barriers, of course, led to huge differences between other groups.
This isn’t an endorsement of apartheid, just a statement of obvious fact. If everybody began mingling and mating together, the theoretical result over time would be the abolition of racial diversity. Cultures, religions, languages, and other such things would fade as the stronger or more popular ones obliterated the weaker. This won’t happen, though, because racial interests will eventually rear their heads and you instead end up with Balkanization.
Small amounts of racial diversity, such as Chinatowns and Japantowns, are a good thing. They’re exotic regions within a dominant culture. But a society obsessed with destroying its traditional dominant culture on behalf of unlimited multi-cultural diversity, and determined to use government to forcibly create a “balance” between those diverse groups, will end up either falling apart, as the Balkans and the former Soviet Union have done, or becoming a dictatorship as the only means of controlling the warring racial, religious, and cultural factions. “Liberals” would enjoy either of those results, hence their obsession with making America a multi-cultural society.
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