In the debates over the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, Democratic Sen. Hubert Humphrey famously expressed the notion that “if we started to treat Americans as Americans, not as fat ones, thin ones, short ones, tall ones, brown ones, green ones, yellow ones, or white ones, but as Americans. If we did that, we would not need to worry about discrimination.” Almost half a century later, Chief Justice John Roberts noted, in the case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” I mention these eminently wise quotations only because it seems obvious that the Connecticut State Board of Education didn’t get the memo. In fact, this body seems determined to undermine the sentiments reflected by contemporary constitutional law on racial discrimination, as well as by Sen. Humphrey’s quotation. I refer to the ludicrous classification of Macdonough Elementary School as “racially imbalanced” simply because a high number of minority students happen to attend it.
According to this Tuesday’s issue of The Argus, Macdonough’s classification as a racially imbalanced school springs from the fact that “the proportion of minorities at Macdonough is 28.67 percent greater than the average for Middletown area elementary schools,” thus marking the school as “racially imbalanced” under the racial imbalance sections of the General Statutes of Connecticut. The Argus explains that under these documents, “a school is racially imbalanced if the percentage of minority population falls outside the range from 25 percentage less to 25 percentage points more than the district average. Schools that are found to be racially imbalanced must submit a correction plan to the school board.”
Having looked at this language again and again, readers must permit me at least one more quotation to sum it up, for as Justice Potter Stewart once wrote, “this is an uncommonly silly law.” And it is especially silly when applied to Macdonough, a school whose “racial imbalance” has not had any visible effect on its performance. In fact, its performance has won awards for excellence, even as the State labors to have Macdonough closed. Yes, that’s right, the State is trying to close an award-winning elementary school because it happens to enroll a larger amount of minorities than non-minorities (read: whites). Who knew school busing had a twin?
More bewilderingly still, Macdonough is silently complying with the State’s edict, and trying to draft plans which would send some of their minority students elsewhere, effectively punishing those very same students for having the audacity to be born with a particular skin color. This is not only unfair to the students—it is arguably unconstitutional under present law, as I mean to demonstrate with the rest of this column.
The idea of racial quotas of the type mandated by CT State law was first taken up by the Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In that decision, the Court concluded narrowly that “the difficulties entailed in varying the level of judicial review according to a perceived ‘preferred’ status of a particular racial or ethnic minority are intractable. The concepts of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ necessarily reflect temporary arrangements and political judgments,” thus negating the possibility of crafting objective legal standards for quotas. This decision was further strengthened in Gratz v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court struck down an admissions program which gave students of particular races automatic advantages in admissions pools, regardless of their individual strengths. Though Macdonough does not admit students in the strictest sense, the overall tenor of these cases surely raises the point that interference with educational institutions for the sake of achieving vaguely defined notions of “racial balance” is impermissible.
Fortunately, this is not the only, nor the most important, legal precedent with bearing on the Macdonough decision. That title belongs to the aforementioned Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District case, which dealt with a program implemented by the Seattle school district in which oversubscribed public schools would have their seats assigned disproportionately to minority students. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts rejected the program in the strongest possible terms, writing that race “is not simply one factor weighed with others in reaching a decision, as in Grutter; it is the factor. Like the University of Michigan undergraduate plan struck down in Gratz, the plans here ‘do not provide for a meaningful individualized review of applicants’ but instead rely on racial classifications in a ‘nonindividualized, mechanical’ way.” Given that Macdonough is currently oversubscribed by minority students, and a similar nonindividualized, mechanical calculus is used to mandate the rejection of prospective enrollees, the facts are eerily similar. The only distinction is the race of the victimized students—a distinction which, properly speaking, should have no bearing in a court of law.
In short, we are bearing witness to a bona fide instance of unconstitutional, racialist thinking in our back yard. Commentators have raised the prospect of making Macdonough a magnet affiliated with Wesleyan—a plan that would, at least, remove Macdonough from the poisonous and irrational public school system. This plan, in the absence of a genuine Constitutional challenge, may be the best one, but what must not be accepted is the idea that Macdonough can be punished for its success as an educational institution simply because it caters to too many people with the same skin color. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race, and that is true no matter the race that is supposedly “disadvantaged.”