The Way To Stop Discrimination - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S LOCATED right at the end of Chief Justice John Roberts decision in the case of Parents Concerned with Community Schools vs. Seattle School District (pdf). You know what I am talking about.

We are talking about John Roberts’ deliberate sound bite neatly inserted into the pages and pages of close legal reasoning. You know how it goes already.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

My, that’s a concept that we could use around here. It is a sound bite that we should all hope will echo down the decades ahead.

But I wanted to get the context. Where did Chief Justice Roberts put the sentence that he knew would be extracted and would be the symbol for the Parents vs. Seattle decision? The sentence is located right at the end of “Opinion of ROBERTS, C.J.,” right before he writes:

The judgments of the Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings.
It is so ordered.

Good idea, eh? Reversing opinions from both the Sixth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Lefties in gross as you might say.

And it is also right before “Opinion by THOMAS, J.” Justice Clarence Thomas begins his concurring opinion with the words:

Today, the Court holds that state entities may not experiment with race-based means to achieve ends they deem socially desirable. I wholly concur in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion.

Well, now, that’s a thought. It recalls the moment in the old Beyond the Fringe sketch where Jonathan Miller talks about Prime Minister Harold Macmillan pressing the nuclear button “or not, as the mood takes him.” That’s the kind of government liberals like. It’s the kind of government that can do anything that seems socially desirable.

The only reason, Justice Thomas writes, that he is writing a concurring opinion is “to address several of the contentions in JUSTICE BREYER’s dissent.” As well he might.

But here is Justice Roberts’ sound bite in context:

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Of course. That is the essential link. Chief Justice Roberts is directly linking his opinion with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case of 1954.

That was when you could get the Supreme Court to vote 9-0 against racism. Today you can only get a 5-4 vote to stop discrimination on the basis of race.

That, I suppose, is progress.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.