Trusting Whitey
by Scott P. Richert
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On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight from the district; declining test scores for all students, but especially minorities; decreasing security for students and for teachers; several years of illegal taxation; and almost a third of a billion dollars in taxes extracted from a city of 150,000 souls, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals determined that District 205 had fulfilled both the spirit and the letter of the lower federal court’s integration order (no easy feat, since the court kept changing the target). Each school in the district came within one-tenth of one percent of meeting the court’s racial quotas; astoundingly, each classroom came within a few percentage points as well, making District 205 perhaps the most racially integrated school district (simply on the basis of numbers) in the history of the United States.
And on June 28, 2007, by a five-to-four vote, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that most of what Rockford had endured had been unnecessary. In fact, it had violated the Constitution of the United States.
Of course, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. did not directly involve District 205 (though Justice Stephen Breyer cited the Rockford case in his dissent), but the issue at stake was the same: “discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the majority, which included Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Anthony Kennedy (though Kennedy only concurred in part and in the judgment). The second district (the et al.) involved in the case, that of Jefferson County, Kentucky, had emerged from a desegregation order in 2000 and promptly did what Rockford would do two years later: voluntarily adopt a race-based assignment plan. The Seattle case was even more perverse than the Rockford one, since the Seattle district “has never . . . been subject to court-ordered desegregation” but “voluntarily adopted student assignment plans that rely on race to determine which schools certain children may attend.” Any such plan, the majority declared, needs to be “narrowly tailored,” and both districts failed on that account.
Proponents of neighborhood schools and opponents of busing (overlapping but not identical groups) might think twice before rejoicing, however. While the decision in Parents Involved might well prevent most of what happened in Rockford from happening somewhere else (or from happening here in Rockford again, a few years down the line), none of the justices on either side questioned the idea that government has “a compelling interest in maintaining racially diverse schools.” Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, came the closest to raising the question, declaring that, “as a general rule, all race-based government decisionmaking—regardless of context—is unconstitutional.” But he was careful to make it clear that the “decisionmaking” in question involved the means used, not the goal itself. Even though Justice Thomas handily demolished the “tenuous relationship between forced racial mixing and improved educational results for black children” and declared that the Constitution is “color-blind,” he continued to hold open the possibility that government might have a compelling interest in imposing racial diversity—in, say, areas where de jure segregation previously occurred.
And that brings us to the crux of the issue: What could that compelling interest possibly be? And if there is none, why does the majority on the Court continue to pretend that there might be one?
In a community where de jure segregation did occur, and, in the process, black children or other minorities were deprived of publicly funded educational opportunities that white children enjoyed, the solution is simple, and always has been: End the segregation, and provide the same educational opportunities to all children. Ending segregation, however, is not the same as forcing integration. Here in Rockford, a true neighborhood-school system would mean that some schools would be 95-plus percent white, while others would be 90-plus percent black and Hispanic. Provided with similar facilities, materials, and, most importantly, teachers, students in each school would enjoy similar educational opportunities. Sitting next to a classmate with darker or lighter skin should have no real bearing on the quality of one’s education.
Here in Rockford, opponents of the desegregation suit often argued that those who favored busing were implying that black and Hispanic children could not learn unless they were around white children. It was a rhetorically useful tactic, not because the pro-busing crowd really believed that, but because they could not come right out and say what they really believed: that the only way that whites can be trusted to provide equal educational opportunities to minorities is to ensure that white students get the same education as blacks and Hispanics. Only then, the thinking goes, will whites be concerned with the proper education of differently colored people.
So the government’s compelling interest in imposing racial diversity in public schools comes down to this: You can’t trust white people. Sadly, Justice Thomas, despite pulling back at the last moment, is the only one of the justices who even seems to understand why that might be wrong. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that he received his (by all accounts, exceptional) primary and secondary education in all-black schools at the hands of white nuns.
Imagine what he might have accomplished if only he had attended a racially diverse public school.
Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles.
This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
[Subscribe online to Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. Click here for details].
1 Comment by John Smith on 15 September 2007:
From almost its very beginning anti-racism has really meant anti-white. The real purpose of almost all affirmative action-type programs was to break up white America, not help minorities, and at that they have succeeded brilliantly. It is becoming irrelevant and somewhat embarrassing to shuffle soon-to-be-minority white students about in the name of integration now that the fundamental goal of destroying white America has largely been achieved.
“End the segregation, and provide the same educational opportunities to all children. ”
These racial programs are also class warfare by another name, passing the responsibility and cost for “racism” onto the white lower classes while allowing the mostly upper-middle class rulers of this society to give themselves a pat on the back for their superior morality while maintaining a profitable (largely segregated) lifestyle for themselves and their children. Busing would have never happened had the parents of Muffy and Tad been facing the reality of their precious kids being carted to a ghetto school with no way out. Exemptions make social engineering possible.
2 Comment by Simon Newman on 15 September 2007:
” In fact, it had violated the Constitution of the United States.”
I think the expression there is ‘No sh*t, Sherlock’.
Not being American I cam to read the US Constitution with fresh eyes a few years back, and was astounded at (a) what a wonderful achievement it is, and (b) how it bears no resemblance to the current government of the United States.
3 Comment by robert m. peters on 15 September 2007:
I view the current Constitution too be a strange document. Those who plotted the Philadelphia convention intended to overthrow the original union under the Articles of Confederation and create a new Union by means of this new Constitution which would put the thirteen states on the road to a unitary government, either toward monarchy (Hamilton) or nationalism (Madison). These plotters were, however, thwarted in their attempt by the delegates who came to the convention, compelling compromise on the unitary plan, and by the ratifying conventions themselves, i.e. the people within their respective states meeting in convention. It is these conventions which gave the current Constitution its lawful legitimacy and it is the understanding of these conventions as documented in letters, journals, speeches and ordinances which give the Constitution and the general government which it creates its a
authority.
However, despite the success of the Jeffersonians/anti-federalists in mitigating much of the danger of the plotters original plans and despite the well-articulated understandings of the ratifying conventions, the foul egg of the empire was ensconced hidden within the Constitution itself, namely in the general welfare statement of the preamble, the commerce clause and the so-called elastic clause. The incubation of this evil egg would depend on the heat generated by the spin by Marshall, Story and Webster. It would finally hatch into the cockatrice Abraham Lincoln and his Republic Party.
Civil rights became the stalking horse and the front for the final Hamiltonian, Whiggish, unitary assault. Their victory has been almost complete.
4 Comment by Tobias Torgerson on 16 September 2007:
“In a community where de jure segregation did occur, and, in the process, black children or other minorities were deprived of publicly funded educational opportunities that white children enjoyed, the solution is simple, and always has been: End the segregation, and provide the same educational opportunities to all children. ”
This was a great article. The Rockford desegragation process was a crime. I am pleased to have an unambiguous statement from a Chronicles writer that de jure segregation should end. Not that there have been statements to the contrary, but sometimes the habit of writers here is to be so opposed to de jure integration that their stand on de jure segregation is obscured. For instance, I got the impression that Samuel Francis was a fan of de jure segregation, and I wonder if he would have thought it worth it to give minority students opportunities equal to whites. Please correct my flawed impression if that’s what it was. (In other words, I’m saying yes, there really is such a thing as racial bigotry, no matter how much liberals blow up and abuse that problem.)
5 Comment by Jerry Cline on 16 September 2007:
I don’t recall any of Dr. Francis’ work that would suggest support of de jure segregation. However, he rightly objected to the flawed Brown v. Bd. decision. The basis of Brown is the ridiculous notion that blacks cannot learn except when sitting next to whites (i.e. the so-called “doll studies”). Importantly, Mr. Richert has touched upon an important point – the real purpose for non-white (mostly black and Hispanic) support of integration is that they seem not to trust “whitey.” However, two points – my guess is that most blacks/Hispanics today attend schools that are largely controlled by blacks and Hispanics. Moreover, these mostly “urban” school districts have some of the highest spending per pupil in the country. My second point – Asians – don’t appear to be complaining too much, considering their overwhelming numbers at some of our best universities. Which begs the question…
6 Comment by Hampton on 16 September 2007:
“We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation.”
“Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes…”
“We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”
– Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, founder of La Raza
“Around the year 2040, whites will become a minority in the United States and, believe me, it will be ‘payback time’.”
- Pro-Immigration Activist, Jorge Sanchez
“And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.”
- African Studies professor, Dr. Kamau Kambon
“Blond hair and blue eyes are a biological defect.”
“The white race is a disease, and the only cure is a bullet. The rule of whites is history. Soon they will be our serfs. It’s now the Age of the Brown Man.”
- Hindu nationalist, Ramesh Sharma
“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Make no mistake about it we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed–not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”
- Jewish studies professor, Dr Noel Ignatiev
.
7 Comment by Bernie on 17 September 2007:
Tobias writes:
“(In other words, I’m saying yes, there really is such a thing as racial bigotry, no matter how much liberals blow up and abuse that problem.)”
There is racial bigotry but it is almost entirely black on white. Given that, whites cannot be faulted for not wanting to subject their children to black racism.
Sam knew this but also didn’t think the state should have much say in where kids go to school.
8 Comment by Derek Leaberry on 17 September 2007:
Growing up in Prince George’s County, MD (ironically in the same town where Sam Francis lived when he died- Seabrook), I have seen the social destruction that school busing can inflict. Prince George’s County was over eighty percent white in 1973, crime was low and the schools mediocre, when the wheels of justice ordered the county to begin a radical busing program late that year. Within twenty years, Prince George’s County became the quintessential “white flight” county. Today, the county is less than thirty percent white(most of these are over sixty years of age), the school system is a wreck, and violent crime has skyrocketed. Only a few suburban counties in the country have as high a violent crime rate as Prince George’s. All the youngsters I was raised with are long gone from Seabrook and from PG County. Home is not home any longer. The root of the demographic revolution in Prince George’s County was the school busing decision of 1973.
9 Comment by Jeff Anderson on 17 September 2007:
Meanwhile…what is taking place at the podium? At the student desk? At the kitchen table over homework and text?
The tyranny of nothing, paid for with trillions from millions. I’m inclined to think it wouldn’t matter where a kid is sent if there is no learning taking place there, anyway.
I lived in Rockford for two years, and I liked the size and location of the city very much. But, it seemed to be an annual event to anticipate just when the school district was going to run out of money…require more taxes…get worse “results” on standardized tests. Rockford is not an isolated example.
May God bless the children in places like these, may He guard them from the foolishness of those entrusted with their care, and may He give us the light of learning in spite of ourselves.
10 Comment by Tobias Torgerson on 17 September 2007:
“For instance, I got the impression that Samuel Francis was a fan of de jure segregation, and I wonder if he would have thought it worth it to give minority students opportunities equal to whites. Please correct my flawed impression if that’s what it was.”
I too think that Brown was flawed. I should not have read more into Francis’ writings than what he wrote. If he did not like de jure segregation, then I think that is good.
11 Comment by Tobias Torgerson on 17 September 2007:
Isn’t there a certain logic, though, to the position that people always care more about the education their own children receive than about that which others do? So on that level it makes sense that whites would care more about black education if their own children and blacks (Hispanics, etc.) were all educated together. The results have been disastrous in attempting to implement this, granted, but do we fault the logic?
12 Comment by Brian Wheeler on 18 September 2007:
If Native Born White Americans do not organize around their legitmate racial interests, they will experience complete economic and racial dispossession in the nation they founded and created.
Bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act.
13 Comment by Leon Haller on 20 September 2007:
Another solid bit of reportage, informed by midwestern common-sense, from Mr. Richert, which, however, as in so many pieces on this site is both too liberal in outlook and characteristically (for CHRONICLES, and all points further left) manages to avoid the ‘real issue’ (as Sam Francis, referred to in the comments, liked to say).
First, the very idea of government operated schools is both a moral and political outrage. People should pay for their own children’s education, as they are expected to do for any other good or service on the free market. Of course, this libertarian position should not be considered absolute. One could imagine, in a VERY different social and historical context, an authentic conservative advocating, for impeccably conservative reasons, some statist/communitarian involvement in education.
But in a society that is anything but a true nation or ‘ethny’ or ‘volksgemeinschaft’, one that either originally was founded as, or at least has devolved into, a heterogeneous, socially atomised collection of mere acquisitive individuals (and yes, such a society is, unlike, say, communism or Islamic theocracy, morally defensible, though I personally disapprove of it), it is illogical and immoral to expect some to pay for the education (or housing, welfare, childcare, nutrition, etc) of any others – but ESPECIALLY others who are genetically (racially) unlike themselves.
What kind of biological fools aid the reproductive success of their planetary genetic competitors (and more often, outright enemies)?
(Answer: Christian and liberal whites. ONLY Christian and liberal whites. No other race behaves in this manner, which is why our race is dying, whilst all others thrive.)
So no, Mr. Richert, it is not the duty of taxpayers to ‘equalize’ school funding, or ‘opportunity’ or anything else, regardless of what happened in the past wrt issues of segregation (surely you are familiar with the long line of classical liberal scholars who have decimated the ideas of ’social(ist) justice’, ‘welfare rights’, ‘equal access’, and all similar Jacobin nonsense).
14 Comment by Leon Haller on 20 September 2007:
(AHH, speaking of educational or other deficits, I hit the submit key inadvertently.)
To continue from comment 13 above.
So yes, the lefties are, I suspect, correct in their empirical belief that whites, who are assumed to have the bulk of ‘redistributable’ wealth, would not wish their tax dollars to go for the benefit of predominantly non-white schools, and hence their desire to foster numerical integration as the way to ensure equal funding is understandable.
Indeed, there is considerable proof for their (morally illegitimate) concerns, at least in California. Here, whites, many of whom are single, urban and childless, with routine majorities vote down new bond issues for public schools. Moreover, as many of those public schools are infested with typically socially and behaviorally deficient minorities, especially genetically violence-prone and substantially ineducable blacks, white parents often are forced to send their children to private schools, and therefore obviously have no reason to raise their own property taxes when they are already in effect paying double tuitions. And why should they?
Which brings me to my second point. Some of the weaklings (and such are liberals, pure and simple) in the comments above rejoice at Mr. Richert’s apparent denunciation of de jure segregation (which Sam Francis certainly supported, though even he wasn’t brave or stupid enough to admit such in public; even a great man needs to pay the rent!).
I appreciate the not particularly subtle distinction (this is not a criticism) Richert draws between ending de jure segregation and government’s compelling racial integration. But what, exactly, was wrong with state-mandated racial segregation in the first place? The whole purpose was to protect whites, the morally superior race, from the harm and characterological contamination that could be expected to result (and which did result, as the history of Negro predation against whites, in schools and everywhere else, of the last half-century attests) from placing them in constant physical proximity to the decidedly morally and culturally inferior blacks.
As the southern segregationist intellectual and racial activist Sam Dickson has wondered, were they (segregation’s defenders) not right in their dire prognostications? Well, Mr. Richert, weren’t they?
I defy you to try to prove me wrong (assuming that you have intellectual self-respect, which I’m sure you do).
America’s hideous experiment in multiracialism has proven itself to be a world-historically costly failure – for whites – with absolutely nothing in the way of compensatory benefits (non-white immigration is liable to the same indictment). How many readers of these comments, or of CHRONICLES, would weep if a great Marcus Garvey-style wave of black separatism swept over the nation and impelled millions of African-Americans to return to their real homeland of Africa? I suspect most of you, if you aren’t too cowed or cowardly to be honest , AT LEAST with yourselves, would be more relieved than anything else. Perhaps we should take that psychologically understandable and morally acceptable sentiment and turn it into the basis for a national movement, whose ultimate goal would be to turn that sentiment into physical reality.
Discrete populations either fight to expand, or wither and die. That is the iron law of life, in this world your God created, but apparently long ago abandoned. We whites are alone, and it it to ‘ourselves alone’ that we must look for succor and survival.
15 Comment by Bob Tyndale on 22 September 2007:
Robert Whitaker of Columbia, SC, and a retired Reagan appointee says:
Liberals and respectable conservatives say there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into ALL white countries and ONLY into white countries.
The Netherlands and Belgium are as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.
Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for ALL white countries and ONLY white countries to assimilate, i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites.
What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?
How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?
And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?
But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.
whitakeronline.ORG
http://www.nationalsalvation.net/
16 Comment by Ed Roberts on 23 September 2007:
“were they (segregation’s defenders) not right in their dire prognostications? Well, Mr. Richert, weren’t they?”
Of course they were right on every single point, as the condition of all US cities clearly demonstrate. “Welfare” programs (so-called because the justification for their establishment comes from the common welfare clause in the Constitution) created a dependant class which could be counted on to elect the politicians who promised the benefits would continue. This led to an expansion of a publicly funded leisure class whose sport was, and still is, violent crime. The crime and increased tax burden drove productive white citizens out of the city limits into the suburbs and to replace the tax revenues lost by white flight, the shamelessly corrupt politicians lured banks and other corporations into the cities by giving them free property (taken from small to medium sized businesses whose clientele had moved out of the cities) on which to build their high rise buildings.
Most downtown areas of US cities are now covered with corporate headquarters buildings and government buildings, and the government offices employ the predominately black bureaucratic middle class. The urban tax consumers who are employed by government as well as those who are dependent on welfare programs are mostly black, as are a majority of the city politicians in many cities. Blacks are not a minority in the cities and haven’t been for quite awhile.
Today’s American blacks segregate themselves in their social events, as demonstrated by Black Bike Week, Black Spring Break, Black Circuses, Black History festivals, and so on. Black people are presented as being morally, intellectually, and physically superior to whites in movies and TV series.
White people are expected to be elaborately polite to black people while black people are allowed to be as rude and inconsiderate of whites as they like. To judge by the content of the US news and entertainment media, it would be easy to conclude that whites are 12% of the population and blacks are the majority.
17 Comment by Leon Haller on 24 September 2007:
Members of this writeback ‘community’ need to emphasize our indictment of ANY race liberalism on this site at every junction and wrt every article that has even the slightest racial angle. I’m gratified that a couple of genuinely conservative comments followed my own above.
I’ve had it with criminal minorities – but I’ve REALLY had it with their white liberal apologists … AND ESPECIALLY WITH RACE-LIARS WHO HAVE THE GALL TO CALL THEMSELVES ‘CONSERVATIVES’.
There is no conservatism apart from racial nationalism. Not in today’s world, anyway.