A Melting Pot No Longer

The Supreme Court is thinking, maybe, you know...of trying out a caste system. It just issued an education and race ruling that appears to be so contorted not even court clerks and former Attorneys General can figure it out. Brown v. the Board of Ed was challenged, and here is what came out Justice Roberts' other end:

Race cannot be a factor in determining racial diversity.

Lucky for you, I am smarter than Supreme court clerks. I'll prove it. For starters, I was smart enough to NOT go to Law School, even when they begged me and offered me free money and women of easy virtue. Having passed that test, I can now correctly interpret what the Court means, without reading all of Justice Kennedy's 15-page masterpiece of ambiguity, moral bluster, and bug-like vacillation. I got it by page #1.

Let's compare the American educational system to a restaurant. The meals it serves are not to be from melting pots, they shall not be bouillabaisse, nor even wretched ratatouilles. They're to be a partitioned smorgasbord. On one end is the great food, educationally speaking. It's available in wonderful variety in the private dining room. Out on the main floor is a long table once of pretty high quality, only now it's mostly fast food. There are still the occasional specials, and sometimes even three-day old leftovers show up from the gourmand section. These don't last long and there is some rather unseemly behavior when deciding who gets to eat those choice morsels. Then there's the dumpster behind the restaurant, which can be surprisingly nutritious for those who are absolutely determined to eat.

How can I assert this? Because it's the Republican-theocratic end game. With this decision, the New Court moved one step closer to realizing one of their dearest visions, a vision you could see coming like a far-off freight train. It's not so far off now. The radical social darwinists who call themselves conservatives (Scalia, Alito, Roberts, et al) do not believe government should have any part in education. At all. They don't believe in public schools to begin with, and that's what informed their latest decision.

It's not about overturning Brown v. the Board of Ed. It's about not having a Board of Ed at all. When placed into that context, their legal teamwork is elegant. A thing of beauty, really. There's not a Board of Ed in the country that is going to be able to successfully interpret this decision, and they'll be agonized over it for years. It's bureaucratic Zen. It guarantees that every public school in the country, when faced with an issue of race, will be in automatic violation no matter what they do. There's no way to avoid violating a policy which isn't a policy to begin with. It's an intentional tautology.