The code word, nowadays, is "diversity."
In a case now being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, a group of educational organizations urges that the school district of Montgomery County, Md. be authorized to continue assigning students to schools based on their race, with the goal of promoting "a culturally diverse learning environment."
The school board currently forbids student transfers to new schools if such transfers would lead to a greater concentration of one race at either school.
That policy was challenged by the parents of a first-grader who wanted to transfer to a school with enriched science and math programs. The application was rejected because the student is white.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the policy and barred use of a student's race as a basis for granting or denying transfer. The school district now seeks high court review.
For the past decade -- with legal race-based segregation a thing of the past -- the court has increasingly moved to outlaw race as a basis for government policies.
But in their friend-of-the-court brief, the National School Boards Association and 16 other groups attempt to persuade the court to hear the Montgomery County case and, weirdly, to move the nation back toward the way school assignments were often handled before 1956 -- by race.
Of course, the new goal would be not segregation, but "diversification" by quota -- the court being urged to set "educating children in a diverse setting" as the nation's new top priority.
Significantly, the group argues: "It is an accepted role of the public schools to prepare America's children to participate in our democracy."
Funny. I thought the main role of the schools was to teach our children reading, history, and arithmetic. What Thurgood Marshall so eloquently argued in Brown vs. Board of Education, two generations ago, was not that children should be shuffled around like chessboard pawns to create some cosmetic symbol of "diversity," but simply that "separate but equal" wasn't equal -- segregated black schools provided second-class educations and virtually no access to the post-secondary professions.
Good riddance to those days. But the educrats' current argument fails on several counts:
The goal of education is to provide each child with basic skills, to cultivate critical thinking and a lifelong love of learning, and to provide maximum opportunity for the child to realize his or her potential -- not to make each classroom look like some Politically Correct singing soda-pop commercial, and certainly not to propagandize the children of this constitutional republic in these bureaucrats' notion of "democracy," a nightmare vision of dysfunctional collectivist mediocrity which we hardly dare contemplate.
More importantly, in America, race does not necessarily equal culture. The needs, beliefs, or cultural values of newly-arrived Hmong immigrants cannot be assumed to be the same as those of fourth-generation Americans of Japanese descent, just because some government form identifies both as "Asian." Likewise, the families of successful black American professionals -- or newly-arrived Caribbean immigrants -- might no more identify with the "culture" of the drug-dealing children of single-parent welfare homes, than would average middle-class white parents. How dare these quota-mongers lump all these people together as one "culture" just because all their complexions feature some level of melanin?
Meantime, are we counting and apportioning Orthodox Jewish children, or the children of snake-handling churches, or the children of families that listen to country music, attend stock car races, and fish for largemouth bass? Shall each school have a quota for children of Italian Communists, of Pakistani Moslems and sharpshooting polygamists and pot-smoking Libertarians and banjo-strumming hillbillies with Tennessee accents?
Those are all different "cultures" to which the "multiculturalists" presumably believe our children should be exposed -- though apparently they don't count, if membership can't be discerned by a quick glance at skin color.
So much for this euphemism, "cultural diversity." Yes, children should be taught to respect and preserve their cultural heritage -- though an education establishment that spent generations shipping Indian boys far from their homes and families, shearing their hair and forbidding them to use their native tongues even on the playground, has some gall lecturing anyone else on "respecting diversity."
What this amicus brief is really all about is protecting the jobs and bureaucratic empires of the "affirmative action" quota-counters, who now find themselves frozen in the headlights of progress, threatened with unemployment in a nation that has long moved past the problem they were originally hired to solve.
The Supreme Court should let the 4th Circuit's ruling stand.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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