This the first of many things I will eventually be writing about the latest Supreme Court decision on matters of school and race. This first essay will be about my reaction and thoughts without having read the decision at all.
As I said on this week's Barbershop episode, I don't believe that race means as much socially now as it did when the Brown decision was made. Society has made significant adjustments and the amount of meaning attributed and attributable to race has declined. The greatest advocate of deracination is Ward Connorly who make sense on one level and is very wrong on another. Connorly rightly understands that no meaning should be applied to race. We should do what we can to minimize official recognition of it so that it becomes over time, more and more impossible to make an official racial determination. He would like race, as far as the government is concerned, to become something like your Zodiac sign. You should never have to apply for any job, school or have any institution ask you about it.
The great flaw in this approach is that certain government agencies have a duty to determine whether or not racial discrimination is taking place, and you cannot measure what you cannot see. For the entire government to be colorblind would render it incapable of policing those who are colorstruck. In this regard, Connorly betrays his unfamiliarity with Civil Rights case law and the legal entities constructed to be watchdogs over racial discrimination. And because he is wealthy and powerful, probably has a specific blindness to the ways and means small racial discriminations provide big hurdles for some people.
The great strength in this approach is that deracination ends once and for all the endless merry-go-round of racial theories, even as they transmute under the guise of culture. We all know how the definitions of a proper black man or woman has changed over time, and we all know how crazy 'blacker than thou' arguments get. All that time wasted could be put to better use, especially since most people who want to disable racism are anti-essentialist anyway.
It is in this strength that any good can come from a Supreme Court decision that limits or ends the significance of race. The problem of course is that no Supreme Court decision changes people's minds.
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