Brown Vs. Board of Education -- Turned Upside Down

Racism is America's Achilles heal, it is the dark side of our history. Whether it was the decimation of the Native American population -- either by way of disease, exile, or wars of extermination (wasn't it Wm. T. Sherman who coined the phrase "The only good Indian is a Dead Indian"?) -- or the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, or the enslavement of Blacks, our record as a just society is suspect.
"Brown vs. the Board of Education" was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that uncovered the hypocrisy of "separate but equal" arguments and set the nation on a path to rectify the dirty secrets of American life. The recent 5-4 Court ruling essentially turns Brown on its head. Arguments for the new ruling call for "color blindness" in assigning students to schools. Any effort to use race in trying to diversify schools is ruled out of order. If only we were a nation that didn't by into the suspect ideology of the homogeneous principle in our choices of housing. It is likely in the schools that we will ultimately undermine racism, which makes Brown so important.
Fellow blogger Michael Westmoreland-White (Levellers) has written an excellent analysis of the dilemma -- from the perspective of one living in Kentucky (one of the two cases that were considered by the High Court). His post has been reprinted at Ethics Daily. I especially appreciate this statement:

Jim Wallis likes to say that racism is "America's original sin," since the nation was founded on the attempted genocide of one racial group and the chattel slavery of another. (Later, injustices to Asians and other ethnic minorities were added, too.) That original sin reared its ugly, and institutional, head again this week. But sin does not have the last word unless we let it.

Let's not let this be the final word!

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