Supreme Court Weighs Race in Public School Admissions

[Yochanan Zev]

Supreme Court Weighs Race in Public School Admissions
Hundreds of Pro-Affirmative Action Demonstrators Rally Outside Courthouse

By Robert Barnes and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 4, 2006; 10:42 AM

Several hundred demonstrators, many of them college or high school students, gathered on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court early this morning to proclaim support for using skin color as a factor in admissions in order to maintain racially diverse public schools.

The court is hearing arguments today in two high-stakes school desegregation cases-- the first test on the issue Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. since they were appointed to the court last term. Both justices in the past have been skeptical about the use of racial classifications.

Some in the crowd that gathered before dawn wore t-shirts bearing a photo of Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice who as a civil rights attorney famously argued the 195 Brown vs. Board of Education case that led to the desegregation of the nation's schools.
"Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas," the demonstrators chanted, "will try to segregate us, and take what we've been promised."

The demonstration was organized in part by student leaders from the nation's historically black colleges and universities, including many from Howard University in the District. Labor groups, the National Organization for Women and teacher's unions also turned out in force.

"We effectively have the same problem," said Colloneal Pinkston, a teacher from the Mark Twain school in Detroit. "We are becoming more and more segregated in our schools by economics and race."

Two teenagers from the District's Dunbar High School, where the student body is virtually all African American and there are no formal desegregation programs, said they came to the demonstration because they thought such programs, and diversity, were intrinsically valuable.

"We think it's important to be able to be in a classroom with children of other ethnicities," said girl, who would not give her name. "We learn from other people."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120400370.html

[wonderfulgoy]

"We think it's important to be able to be in a classroom with children of other ethnicities," said girl, who would not give her name. "We learn from other people."



Someone has a black boyfriend ....  ('Learn from other peoples/cultures' is a long-standing euphemism for inter-racial sex, incidentally.)

[Mishmaat]

I think it's important that people (preferably of the darker persuasion) who think like this should have a drink of orange juice with cyanide! Learn by experimenting!

[fjack]

Brown vs. Board of Ed was just an excuse for blacks to molest little white girls, form packs to prey on whites in the hall, to have a new school to trash since there was nothing left to trash in their school, to annoy teachers, to roam through white neighborhoods at lunch time to vandalize and to blame whitey for their underachievement. I was watching je$$e jack$on show this past Saturday, and I heard him say that a black school that just recieved new computers, all high tech video and audio equipement was broken into and all the items were stolen. He wants more money to replace the new things that were stolen. More wasted money. I supposed it was the CIA, FBI and co-intel that committed this crime. Who do you think destroys the school books, urinates in the stairwells, writes obscenties all over the walls, starts riots, abuses female students and teachers, assualts students and teachers and uses the vilest language you can imagine. Ask a school teacher and I sure the posters on this forum will not be surprised as to the answer you will get.

[Hail Columbia]

"We think it's important to be able to be in a classroom with children of other ethnicities," said girl, who would not give her name. "We learn from other people."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120400370.html

She's right, but not in the way in which she intended.

Anyway, I thought that Brown vs. Board of Education was against using race as a factor in school atendance.

[Yochanan Zev]

AA is seriously flawed and needs to be fixed.

It is believed that it is good for Hispanic and Black children from low-income families to gain exposure to children healed outside of the ghetto/barrio, and have the opportunity to compete in an academic setting with students who are unlike themselves.  It prepares them for the real world.  What I understand the argument from most White and Asian parents  is that their children really don't benefit from having them as classmates.

I agree with the sentiment that AA should have nothing to do with giving away handouts or tolerating delinquent or unsociable behaviour.  Many of the same well-intentioned left leaning people who in their defense of AA programs have allowed them to become corrupted.