Goodbye Brown v. Board

You might have seen it on the news: The Supreme Court has found a way to transport the country back to the 1950's...and not in a good way. From what I understand, they've ruled that schools are not allowed to use race as a factor in placing students.

I'm going to throw out a short link dump here because I suspect the few folks who read this aren't going to see a lot of this in other places.

Scott Lemieux at LGM with some notes.

Jill at Feministe.

Christy at Firedoglake.

The Washington Post on some likely fallout, including increased school segregation. Did I say increased? Yes, because, as the article notes, schools have become more and more segregated over the last couple of decades.

SCOTUSblog.

Actually, SCOTUSblog has a great excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts' decision that really gives a big part of the game away:

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

Leaving aside for a second that the above sentence is beyond stupid, this reveals, depending on who you ask, either a political trick or a genuine belief on the part of many conservatives. Basically, it's the out-of-sight-out-of-mind trope. The reasoning is as follows: If we don't see race, we can't possibly discriminate on the basis of race. The sheer stupidity of this argument is the reason that many people (sometimes including myself) think that this is nothing more than a political gambit. Then again, lots of people seem to genuinely believe that paying attention to race has negative consequences. In a way, it does - public attention to race was a big factor in ending lots of discrimination as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, I guess according to the scary logic of folks like Roberts, ignoring race is a way to get back to the good ol' days when 'everyone' 'knew' that people of color were somehow inferior. Excuse me, I meant to say that 'ignoring race is a way to end discrimination.'

Give me a fucking break. This is such transparent bullshit. Conservatives have such a strange understanding of terms like "discrimination" and "racism" that I can only think they do this shit on purpose as part of some giant strawman game. Also, it makes me a little sad to admit that white supremacy (and sexism) is probably a big part of why the Democrats didn't really freak out when Alito and Roberts were nominated.


UPDATE:

I broke the code while putting away my socks. When Roberts says this:

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

what he means is this:

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to go back to pretending black people don't exist."

UPDATE: Minor edits for clarity. Also, I should add that I think lots of conservative folks, especially political commentators and people in positions of power, don't really understand terms like "diversity" or "difference" or "discrimination" in the way many people on the 'left' do; furthermore, as I said above, I think some of that misunderstanding is an intentional attempt to poison the terms as a way to discredit the ideas behind the terms. Just wanted to make that a little clearer.