Pawns

There’s a case before the Supreme Court right now, dealing with busing. A particular family in Seattle objects to having its teenagers get up at 5 a.m. and arrive home at 9 p.m., so that they might be shipped across the county in order to achieve a statistically pleasing ethnic “diversity,” per the local city school district. These kids are too white to go to the neighborhood school, you see.

The racists are attempting to persuade a majority of the justices that there is a “compelling” government interest in manipulating the government school monopoly to conform to a theory of the benefits, educational and social, of racial “diversity.” Thomas Sowell says it with less bitterness and more eloquence than I can muster: “If so, then supposedly it is OK to do to white kids today what the Supreme Court back in 1954 said could not be done to black kids -- namely, assign children to schools according to their race.”

What are we to make of such a thing? Sowell says it with less bitterness and more eloquence than I could: “Those of us old enough to remember the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education will see a painful irony now, since that case began because a black girl was not allowed to go to a school near where she lived but was instead assigned to a different school far away, because of the prevailing racial dogmas of that day.”

That’s all. I don’t have any great point to make. Sowell said it.


J