Dean's World

Thomas Sowell opines about school desegregation cases before the U.S. Supreme Court:

"Those of us old enough to remember the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education will see a painful irony now, since that case began because a black girl was not allowed to go to a school near where she lived but was instead assigned to a different school far away, because of the prevailing racial dogmas of that day. The racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas. Some of the learned justices are pondering whether there is a 'compelling' government interest in creating the educational and social benefits of racial "diversity." If so, then supposedly it is OK to do to white kids today what the Supreme Court back in 1954 said could not be done to black kids -- namely, assign children to schools according to their race. What are those 'compelling' benefits of 'diversity'? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor's wardrobe. Not only is there no hard evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in school produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or exceed the national average, even though most black schools fall far below the average."

My response: I mostly agree with Mr. Sowell. His commentary would have more force had he added that government-instituted school desegregation rests on the notion of white supremacy and black inferiority: i.e., that black children magically cannot succeed unless they are around white children). Of course, this notion ignores the number of talented black folks who have come out of all-black educational settings. The focus should be on (1) more black parents building up the educational potential of their children at home, and (2) pushing for school vouchers which enable black folks to create the sort of neighborhood schools that may work best for black children (e.g., schools with high discipline, a strong religious-based curriculum since polls show that 80%+ of black parents would like such educational instruction in schools, more focus on black contributions to various disciplines, etc.)

Speaking of segregation, I've never been able to handle the concept of people waving and displaying Confederate flags. Sometimes they claim a "states' rights" orientation or a "Southern culture" kind of thing and say that I, as a conservative, should appreciate that there was "another side" to the Civil War (or the "War Between the States," as they like to call it.)

I don't buy that, either. Yes, there was an argument about states' rights; but it erupted over slavery, and not anything else; and there is no moral grey area about the enslavement of human beings in the Americas.

Why raise this now? Well, we've been wading in the waters of segregation here today, and then I saw this item: Civil-war profiteer historian (just kidding — he's entitled to make a living) Ken Burns explains, in an interview with what appears to be a liberal blog called Campus Progress, that even that argument is pretty weak:

The confederate flag was adopted by many of the states as their flag, not before the Civil War, not during the Civil War, or not even in the immediate period afterwards, that much misunderstood period called Reconstruction. Those flags were instituted in the 1950’s and there’s only one thing that happened in the 1950’s that would have caused the southern states to add the confederate flag. They took one of the battle flags . . . made it the symbol of segregation and resistance to civil rights and codified it in their flags. In that regard I find that the enthusiasm for the confederate flag today is both misplaced, misunderstood, and absolutely a symbol of racism.

I don't see how you can see it any other way — though I know Dean disagrees, and his disagreement is kind of interesting in light of his world-class Dhimmitude and other indicia of what we'd call political correctness if we didn't know Dean. Hat tip to aTypical Joe.