Use of Race in School Plans for Integration - Is That Really Necessary?

Filed in archive Latin Issues , Latin Issues on June 30, 2007

From the New York Times:

A bitterly divided Supreme Court declared Thursday that public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student's race.

Voting 5 to 4, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., invalidated programs in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky., that sought to maintain school-by-school diversity by limiting transfers on the basis of race or using race as a "tiebreaker" for admission to particular schools.

I don't think this decision was a bad call. In fact, I think that denying a student a transfer to his chosen kindergarten class, because the school he wants to leave needs to keep its white students, in order to stay within the program's racial guidelines, is ridiculous and arbitrary.

Over here, in the 3rd World, we have racial diversity in each and every school. There's no racial program or whatsoever; people send their children to any school they want (public school's students are assigned by default to their home's nearest school, but you can always ask to be transferred), and that's it.

Off course we have other issues - for instance, children from poor families have less access to education - but that has nothing to do with race. Why do people in the US feel that a racial diversity program for schools is needed?

Chief Justice Roberts said "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," and I couldn't agree more. Using race to assign children to schools is horrible, even if it's done with the best of intentions. Race shouldn't be used to anything besides having pride in your own heritage.

School segregation is unconstitutional, and that's the way things must be. We should be fighting racism, instead of preventing children to attend their preferred education center.