New Toon: Resegregation Nation, or Goodbye Brown vs. Board of Education
All you closet Klansmen out there, you would-be Bull O'Connors and George Wallaces, listen up: it is officially time to party! Get out your balloons and confetti, and iron your best white robes, because the Bush Supreme Court has officially declared that racial integration and diversity DON'T MATTER AT ALL. The Bush court says that not only is segregation totally cool (as long as it's the "natural" result of segregated housing areas), it's actively RACIST to oppose segregation. Why? Because racial diversity is AGAINST the spirit of Brown vs. Board of Education.
Yes, that's right--it's against the spirit of the decision that made it possible for children of all colors to go to school together to encourage children of all colors to go to school together. The only way to avoid racism is to DENY it and ignore it and NOT DO ANYTHING TO STOP IT. That's what being "colorblind" is all about!
As the NAACP's Theodore Shaw put it on The Newshour With Jim Lehrer tonight, it doesn't get much more Orwellian than this. This is Civil Rights Lite to the extreme. Hence the vigorous dissent:
[Souter] said the chief justice’s invocation of Brown vs. Board of Education was “a cruel irony” when the opinion in fact “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions” by ignoring the context in which it was issued and the Supreme Court’s subsequent understanding of it to permit voluntary programs of the sort that were now invalidated.
I was particularly horrified by the anti-integration argument that many parents "don't want this" ("this", presumably, being the horror of their children going to school with black kids). For example, here's Roger Clegg, president of the deceptively named "Center for Equal Opportunity" (his group filed an amicus brief in the case) celebrating the anti-integration decision on the NewsHour:
I think that school boards are also going to be sensitive to the fact that most parents don't like it when they are told that where they can send their children to school depends on what color they are.And...
I think the question is whether anyone believes that a politically correct racial and ethnic mix, that kind of diversity, is worth the price of racial discrimination. And I think that most Americans would say that, no, it is not.
Sure, lots of Americans--bigoted and ignorant ones--protested school integration back in the day because they didn't want it, either. That didn't make them RIGHT. That was the whole POINT of Brown vs. Board! As the NAACP's Shaw put it:
This [integration] is not about school districts telling people that they can't go to school on the basis of their skin color. This is about school districts trying to continue to fulfill the promise of Brown and to avoid segregation. In no way is this comparable to the kind of regime of segregation and discrimination that existed under Jim Crow.
Exactly.
Finally, while we're on the topic of Brown vs. Board of Education, this is particularly bad timing, because I just did a dystopian cartoon for Lambda Legal wondering "What would life be like without integrated schools?":
Prepare to find out. And God Bless Our Colorblind America, where the playing field is level, everyone has an equal chance, and white kids can just learn about colored folks on their Tee-Vees!
Next up: in a landmark victory for Americans who don't like sharing water fountains, the Supreme Court rules that allowing black people and white people to drink from the same water fountains violates the Constitution.
P.S. I would have called this cartoon "Separate But Equal: The Sequel", but I already drew a cartoon with that title. Oh well.
P.P.S. Just so it's clear--in the cartoon, the kids of color are locked up in a "Jim Crow Max Security Educational Facility" not because they're troublemakers or deserve to be there, but because they live under racist segregation.
For more on this horrible decision, see BrownFemiPower and Amanda at Pandagon and Samhita at Feministing.
Labels: cwa, judiciary, race and racism, scotus
13 Comments:
You don't get it at all do you? You've got it COMPLETELY backwards!
RACE is not an acceptable criteria for either the acceptance or rejection of ANY child when it come to receiving a good education. ALL children deserve a good education regardless of race or ethnicity. If you think that racial quotas are acceptable then you must not have been listening when MLK, Jr. spoke of "Content of Character, and not the color of your skin".
You cannot create equality by granting preferential treatment to ANY group of people over another. Let me repeat that -- you cannot create equality with preferential treatment.
Go listen to MLK, Jr. again, and then revisit this decision. Freedom and equality won a VICTORY today, not the other way around.
NOW, let's get to working on ensuring ALL schools are safe, and offer a good quality education, shall we???
It always makes my head spin when I hear conservatives quoting MLK Jr.'s "content of our character" line in support of polices that would result in segregation, the very thing he fought so vigorously against.
Like Justice Roberts, you're ignoring the CONTEXT of Brown vs. Board of Education. That ruling wasn't designed to pretend racism doesn't exist--that ruling was designed to create integration.
The opposite of racism is not "colorblindness", which is just a fancy word for ignoring racism. Colorblindness, and totally ignoring racial diversity as a factor in education, would only work if this country were way past racism. We're so NOT there yet. White flight is still a big issue.
The opposite of racism is combating racism and fighting racism and actively working towards understanding and integration and an equality.
Do YOU really think it was Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream for all the white kids in a white neighborhood to go to an all-white school and for all the black kids to live in an all-black neighborhood and thus go to an all-black school? King also said in that speech:
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
And:
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."
I went to a bussing public arts magnet school that deliberately aimed at diversity and reflecting the diverse mix of kids from my entire city of Lowell, Massachusetts. My school was about 40% white or less, and maybe 20% black, 20% Southeast Asian and 20% Latino/a, and we were from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. When your friends are kids of all different backgrounds and countries of origin and colors, I think kids of all colors benefit, because you don't grow up thinking of people as "other" or a one-dimensional stereotype or some weird kind of person only visible in the media. They're just your friends.
I'm sorry your dream for America is a country in which segregation is ignored in the name of "colorblindness."
I can hear it now: "I have a dream of a nation in which white children only learn about black children on TV, and in which black children receive a separate and unequal segregated education."
Oh, and to answer your "So do you want race to be a factor..." question... I want FIGHTING RACISM to be a factor. I want diversity to be a factor. I want kids learning to accept each other to be a factor in a quality education. That doesn't interfere with a quality education, that SUPPORTS it. Education isn't just reading and math skills.
Mikhaela,
"fighting racism" is just an abstraction. How you do that is make certain laws. Not everyone agrees with the way the laws are set up but that doesn't mean they are racist. A lot of people oppose affirmative action because of it's flawed reasoning.
I'm not saying I agree with the Supreme Courts decision, but you wrote.
"I was particularly horrified by the anti-integration argument that many parents "don't want this" ("this", presumably, being the horror of their children going to school with black kids)."
I saw on TV that one of the woman who didn't want this was a black woman whos child had to ride a bus an hour and a half each way to school instead of going to a nearer school. This was done for integration based on race.
Many Americans don't like the "you don't know what's best for you" approach and being forced to go to a school further away "for their own good."
So it's not all knee-jerk racism.
Matt, I'm not arguing the specifics of this case. And I'm not saying it's just white parents who oppose these particular integration plans.
But the bottom line here is that the court has declared that diversity does not matter and that schools cannot deliberately encourage racial diversity in schools, even as one factor among others.
Sure, bussing can suck for kids of color, too. And an hour and a half bus trip is extreme. And it can lead to this effect of kids of color feeling like they're being "sprinkled" into white schools to add diversity, and facing (racist) crap from the white kids at the school.
But as flawed as some implementations of integration plans may be, we have to do that difficult work, and the goal should not be to abandon integration, but to make it work. I feel the same way about affirmative action, and I don't think the reasoning is flawed at all.
We do not have a level playing field in this country, and for years white people have had advantages and gotten ahead based on the color of their skin. This country has a shocking history of racism, and institutional racism is alive and kicking in education and elsewhere. But somehow it's reverse discrimination to take that into account in college admissions?
But back to this decision. Sure, some integration plans are flawed.
What's the alternative? Let go of the dream of racial integration? Let racism be and just pretend it doesn't exist? Let neighborhoods segregated by race and class lines mean that schools are similarly segregated?
Again, I'm thinking of my hometown. It was a good-size small city, but the neighborhoods were very much segregated by class and ethnicity and so on. So the schools in the white neighborhoods were fancy-pants schools with new textbooks. The schools in the Cambodian and Latino and black neighborhoods ... well, I remember going to a school my dad taught at when I was a kid and there weren't any doors on any of the bathroom stalls and the building was falling apart. And even aside from that, in such a diverse city, the kids were only surrounded with their immediate neighbors.
Sure, racism is an abstract in general. But it manifests in very concrete ways everywhere, every day, and many of its effects can be observed and measured.
well, I typed something but it didn't show up. So we'll just pickup the discussion in DC.
See ya there!
Sure. But here's another counter-example, from an NYTimes piece today:
"Jefferson County, the Louisville-area district that yesterday’s ruling was concerned with, revised its plan repeatedly after coming out from its court order. It now has some of the most integrated schools in the nation, keeping black enrollment in most schools between 15 percent and 50 percent by encouraging, and occasionally obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods and black students to attend schools in white ones.
Fran Ellers, a white parent who sends her children to a school in a black neighborhood, said yesterday that she was disappointed with the ruling.
“I have been so proud of Louisville’s very diverse school system,” Ms. Ellers said. “My son has a group of buddies, from all over the county, and they’re black and white, and only one is from our neighborhood. Going back to neighborhood schools would be a big loss.” "
Hey Mikhaela,
Looks like Editor & Publisher did an article on cartoonists blasting the Supreme Court today, and you're mentioned.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/syndicates/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003605817
Sometimes I think of the Bus Boycott, and compare it to our reluctance to be "inconvenienced" by integration policies.
It's a shame we seem to have lost the "make a sacrifice now for the sake of our grandchildren" spirit.
Excellent writing, Ms. Reid.
Hi Mikhaeka,
Wonderful cartoon. And your comments are well-put and spot-on.
A lot of us in Louisville are saddened that our voluntary school desegregation plan was gutted by the court. I don't mind sending our biracial daughter on the 30-minute bus ride to her home school; we're proud of our school system.
I was in high school in 1975. Those "anti-bussing" marches outside our downtown apartment, often featuring robed Klansmen, were an ugly thing to behold. Louisville is still pretty segrated residentially, but we've come along way in the last 30 years. It's great to have support from a prominent cartoonist who gets it -- and expresses it so powerfully and elegantly.
Thank you Steve! I don't have children now, but I would hate to think that my future children would grow up in a world where segregation is accepted. I also had a half-hour bus ride to my bussing school and I used it to talk to my friends and tell stories and read. I'm so glad you enjoyed the cartoon.
See ya there!
Car Finance Team agreed that RACE is not an acceptable criteria for either the acceptance or rejection of ANY child when it come to receiving a good education.
Good luck
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