Back to the Future

This June I wrote about Chief Justice John Robert's nutjob ruling in the Parents Involved school desegregation case that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." In other words, his damned fool argument was that it was racist to try to figure out if a school districting plan was racist by counting how many people of ever race attended the schools in the district.

I lectured the Chief Justice that what he was doing meant that if racist school administrators decided to funnel black students into crappy schools in order to keep the good school lily white—rather a pattern in American educational history, that—the government would now be helpless to fight it.

Mr. Chief Justice said: not to fear. It was only "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin."

Read a newspaper, Mr. Chief Justice. Specifically, yesterday's New York Times. And consider what you've just wrought.