Supreme Court Overturns Race-Based Student Assignments

The Supreme Court has overturned the race-based assignment of students in Seattle and Louisville schools. (The decision can be found here).

CEI filed an amicus brief arguing that schools shouldn’t receive deference from the courts when they use race, pointing to the bizarre racial statements made by the Seattle Schools.

CEI pointed out that the Seattle Schools, on their website, have falsely claimed that “emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology” constitutes “cultural racism,” that only whites can be racist, that it is racist to expect minorities to plan ahead the way white people do, and that colorblindness is bad.

Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion announcing the court’s decision cites these statements, which were brought to the court’s attention by CEI.

So, too, does Justice Thomas’s concurrence, which rejects giving any deference to schools when they use race, and emphasizes that the bizarre “racial theories endorsed by the Seattle school board should cause the dissenters to question whether local school boards should be entrusted with the power to make decisions on the basis of race.”

At SCOTUSblog, I discuss what today’s decision means in this post.

Earlier, I explained why the use of race in the Seattle is not justified under a “desegregation” or “integration” rationale, since racial “imbalances” are not the same as “segregation,” and since Seattle has never been segregated, and there is therefore nothing to “desegregate” or “integrate.” John Rosenberg also has discussed the case at his insightful blog Discriminations.