Arkansas Blog

If anyone is interested in the factual background of the Seattle and Louisville school districts involved in this case (and doesn't want to wade through the opinion, which weighs in at 185 pages), here is a pretty good summary, passed on with no opinion about the merits of the Court's decision (185 pages is too much to read at the moment):

http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2007/06/the_school_plan.html

Better get your abortion now, folks. If you're gay, think about emigrating. If you're black or hispanic, lord help you.

Oh, and if you ever wanted to read "Huckberry Finn," better get through it before October.

I keep thinking of the scene in "Snow White" where the wicked queen hexes the apple and it turns all yucky before resuming its previous outward appearance but with an inner poison -- and seeing Dick Cheney instead of the queen.

I bet more people know what Paris Hilton said on Larry King than know about this Supreme Court ruling -- or care.

Oh my! A 5-4 ruling.

Surely the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette will criticize any action taken on account of this decision by "a narrow but willfull majority."

Though I share Carrick Patterson's concern over gay rights, abortion, and race, I think he might have mixed up his censorship target in citing Huckleberry Finn as a target for conservatives. Most of the anti-Huckleberry Finn rhetoric comes from our fellow liberals. For example, those seeking the banning or bowdlerization of Huck in this article are likely liberals of a sort:

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/09.28/huckfinn.html

Conservatives, on the other hand, dig Huck Finn:

http://jollyroger.com/beaconway/conservative.html

I personally agree with the Harvard professor in the article at the first link. HF is an important book in our intellectual history, and to ignore it altogether or to destroy it by paraphrase strikes me as rash. The issues of the language used in the book are grist for discussion, not cause for banishment.

You are so right CP. Those of us who can't pass in what the white man biased [Thomas is a white man in blackfact] Supreme Court feels through it bigotry is "right and just" better hightail it out of the country.
Tonight's meeting of the LR school board looked fraught before this decision - now we can really live down to the recent NYT front page piece about having gone no where in 50 years. Hell, nowhere has come back to us compliments of the Bush Supreme Court.
So they begin to unravel Brown v. Board of Education, what will be next, reinstatement of Plessy v. Fergurson?
I wish I had a Harvard law degree so I could be as bright as the statement the chief wrote in his decision - "in order to end racial discrimination, we have to end racial discrimination." And how do we do that Mr. bright eyes? by returning to the local law of the jungle where the majority enslaves the minority. That really elevates the social contract we all have with one another. Any African, Asian, Latino American who votes Republican ever again, has to have a death wish. To paraphase the insightful German pastor Rienhold Neibur said after WWII, "first they came for the blacks, but I was not black. Then they came for the Latinos, but I am not Latino. Then they came for the Asians, but I am not Asian. Then they came for the gays, but I am not gay. Then they came for the liberals, but I am not liberal. Then they came for me, and I was alone."
My country just became a very much lonlier, colder, more heartless place today.

I am the biggest Liberal idioit of all my family and freinds yet I cannot justify to my intellect how if something is bad, (racial descrimination) how can it (racial descrimination) be good ?

If we determine picking someone based on race is unconstitutioal then how can deciding to pick someone else based on race be constitutional?

If murder is bad, then stop all murdering.

I believe that quotas perpetuate the victim entitlement mentality and actually does more harm than good.

It may seem fair to reverse discriminate but we should be interested in stopping unconstitutional practices instead of substituting one evil for another.

Haven't had time to read the article Gaddis posted, but I presume that any district that is the subject of a judicial determination that it discriminated in the past is also subject to race-based remedies for that constitutional violation.

I'm thinking the judicial determination of past discrimination by the districts in Pulaski County would entitle them to use race in remediating that discrimination, pursuant to a current or past court order.

Gaddis?

I think you are probably wrong, TAP. Louisville's history is very much like Little Rock's, at least according to the summary I posted above.

To wit:

"[Louisville's] Public schools were officially segregated by race, before a federal court ordered desegregation in 1975. Court order remained in place until 2000. County school system in 2001 then adopted voluntary plan on student assignment."

Louisville had a plan that required schools to maintain certain minimum and maximum levels of African-American enrollment (between 15% and 50%). Louisville, though, is different from LRSD in that it only has 34% African-American enrollment, which apparently led to some white kids getting turned away from schools they wanted to attend (and thus the litigation).

Thanks Gaddis. In the future I will avoid asking for your time when I haven't invested my own.

It's just that you understand and explain these things better than I.

Looks to me like both of the plans were *voluntary* -- that is, not undertaken pursuant to a court order to remedy desegregation.

Seattle, having started its plan in 1977, wasn't under court supervision. Louisville once was under supervision, but was released in 2000, before starting its voluntary plan in 2001.

Thanks to Gaddis for the link, and it seems to me after a quick peek that any district still under supervision can continue to use race as a factor in compliance with court orders.

In tonite's PBS debate Hillary called the decision an "outrage."

Doesn't Roberts' "end of discrimination" act just like "healthy forests?"

Which justices are likely to be going out in the next 8 years?

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Such simple words from Judge Roberts, yet so hard for some to understand. No special treatment or consideration for white folks. No special treatment or consideration for black folks, either... or yellow folks, or Hispanics or pink, or polka-dotted. No special treatment or consideration for sexual, ethnic, social class, or religious grounds.

Why can't we all be just folks, without adjectives?

UTR

I understand your sentiment UTR.

Some would point out that many in my generation attended segregated schools, and our parents attended segregated and highly substandard schools, and the effects of those things haven't vanished.

To suddenly become colorblind now is like allowing one runner to walk off a quarter mile lead, then firing the starter's pistol on the theory that by starting all runners at the same time, you are being fair in the mile race.

I know it's more complicated, but that is the nature of the premise.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in Arkansas, we could look to a media source, the Gazette, that mustered moral integrity and backbone to speak out, even when it cost something to speak out.

To whom can we look now, in Arkansas? Have any media venues proven themselves willing to pursue truth even when it costs them to do so--to act with moral integrity when doing so requires a price to be paid?

To whom shall we look now, in Arkansas, for this kind of leadership?

Who is willing to tell the stories beneath the surface, which we all knew were there in the segregation era, but which few mainstream newspapers ever wanted to tell, for fear of alienating the economic interest groups to whom they were indebted?

With this statement Roberts shows his colors:

"in order to end racial discrimination, we have to end racial discrimination."

The key thing is that there is discrimination present against blacks, no matter how you slice it, and the opposite type of discrimination counterbalances it. If the former were able to be rooted out, then the latter would not be necessary to solve the problem.

Of course, he KNOWS that. He's just trying to baffle with bull$hit. The point is they WANT discrimination against those of color to happen, and have just let everyone know that.