The Issue is Economics, Not Who Likes You

The Damage of Brown v. Board of Education

[Reprinted from Issues & Views Summer 1995]

There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment.

What sound, sensible words. How long so many of us have waited to hear them and see them once again in public print. They are all the more meaningful since they emanate from the pen of a black man. These words come from the concurring opinion of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the Missouri v. Jenkins decision of June 12, 1995. Such words and the meaning behind them are neither shocking nor foreign to a great many blacks. Even over these tumultuous decades of liberal persuasion and perfidy, there are blacks who have vented their indignation at the bigoted presuppositions behind the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Suppressed and even ridiculed, such blacks nonetheless have clung to their certitude that this decision was wrong.

The original Brown decision was, of course, welcomed by most middle class blacks, since it gave them an additional tool with which to pry open entry for themselves into white institutions. It also provided one more peg on which to hang their abandonment of the black masses to the guardianship of government.

Over the years, people such as Tony Brown and Robert Woodson continued to make clear the distinctions between desegregation and integration. In one instance Brown wrote, "The masses of blacks have historically opposed segregation, which is state-enforced separation of the races, and fought for desegregation, which is freedom of choice. Diabolically, the end result was integration, which taught blacks not to want to go to school with one another, not to want to live with one another, and not to spend money with one another."

And Woodson declared, "I didn't fight for integration, I fought against segregation. The opposite of segregation is not integration, it is desegregation. I want the right to sit in a black church, if I choose to, without being called a separatist or supporter of a segregated institution."

Says Justice Thomas in the Jenkins decision, "It is a fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race. . . . Racial isolation itself is not a harm; only state-enforced segregation is." In the Jenkins decision, Thomas claims that the harm identified in the original Brown v. Board of Education decision was tied only to legal segregation, meaning separation that was demanded by government law. But this never had anything to do with individuals making choices.

The Constitution does not prevent individuals from choosing to live together, to work together, or to send their children to school together, so long as the State does not interfere with their choices on the basis of race.

Segregation was not unconstitutional because it might have caused "psychologi cal" feelings of inferiority. It was unconstitutional because the government involved itself in making demands upon its citizens that were never granted by the writers of the Constitution. Thomas continues,

[The District Court of Kansas City, Mo.] found that racial imbalances constituted an ongoing constitutional violation that continued to inflict harm on black students. This position appears to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites.

This is the gospel that black elites, guided by their white liberal mentors, have sold to the American people for over 40 years. Worse, each generation of black youth is conditioned to accept these notions of their own inferiority. At one time, one risked life and limb to dare challenge the pseudo-scientific "research" of the psychobabbler Kenneth Clark, on whose theories so much of the Brown decision is based.

The Brown decision came as a slap in the face to proud blacks like writer Zora Neale Hurston, who, upon hearing of the decision, declared, "The whole matter revolves around the self-respect of my people. How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them? I regard the ruling of the United States Supreme Court as insulting, rather than honoring my race."

In a sense, Thomas's concurrence in Missouri v. Jenkins vindicates the teachings of other proud blacks like Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, S.B. Fuller and Malcolm X. And why not? It was Thomas, after all, in that now famous 1987 interview with Juan Williams, who quoted Malcolm's exhortation to black men not to look to integration as a panacea, but to concentrate on building among themselves, "wherever possible, however possible."

Thomas continues in Jenkins:

[Historically black schools] can be both a source of pride to blacks who have attended them and a source of hope to black families who want the benefits of . . . learning for their children. Because of their distinctive histories and traditions, black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.

Such was certainly true in the cases of two outstanding black schools in the segregation era, Dunbar High School in Washington, DC and Williston High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. Williston, which was founded by blacks, staffed by black teachers and administered by black principals, had to be dismantled when federal courts demanded that the city of Wilmington comply with integration laws. In a recent memoir about the school, an alumnus, reflecting on the loss of Williston, claims, "A terrible price was paid by our black society."

Law professor Alex Johnson, commenting in 1992 in the California Law Review, on another Supreme Court decision, wrote of his concern over the possible elimination of historically black colleges, "all under the guise of 'integration.'" Yet what else can be the consequence of living under the commands of Brown v. Board of Education? Isn't this what those black elites were looking forward to when they cheered the passage of Brown back in 1954?

Johnson claims that a court decision built upon a premise of integrationism, as first articulated in Brown, "has failed our society," and, furthermore, "Brown was a mistake." The process of integration, argues Johnson, should be voluntary, not forced. This is the only way to protect the uniqueness of African-American institutions. And, one might add, it would protect the uniqueness of everyone else's institutions as well.

One is compelled to ask why it was necessary to have undergone so many soul-shattering changes and to have lost so much, in order to get back to such a basic truth. Only the guiding hand of prestige-seeking elites could have led the masses to support 40 years of self-denigrating social policies.

Justice Thomas goes on to claim, in Jenkins, that the law does not give courts the right to impose and enforce race-mixing.

This misconception has drawn the courts away from the important goal in desegregation. The point of the Equal Protection Clause is not to enforce strict race-mixing, but to ensure that blacks and whites are treated equally by the State without regard to their skin color. The lower courts should not be swayed by the easy answers of social science, nor should they accept the findings, and the assumptions, of sociology and psychology at the price of constitutional principle.

The courts were never given the constitutional responsibility to solve social problems, Thomas says. "The federal courts also should avoid using racial equality as a pretext for solving social problems that do not violate the Constitution." The notion must be put aside forever, states Thomas, that an all-black school district is proof of the need for legal remedy.

The desire to reform a school district, or any other institution, cannot so captivate the Judiciary that it forgets its constitutionally mandated role. . . . At some point, we must recognize that the judiciary is not omniscient, and that all problems do not require a remedy of constitutional proportions.

Thomas's long-held claim that "the issue is economics, not who likes you" was as true in 1890 and 1910 as it is today. "There is no governmental solution," he says. And he means it.

The Brown decision, more than any other law, shaped the future of American blacks, as its promise of integration seduced us away from the task of building among ourselves. As the indigenous black-run school disappeared, so did other cultural institutions, and with them went the local power derived from them. Kevin Cosby, a black minister, in 1992, led a successful offensive against involuntary school busing in Louisville, Kentucky. Claiming that the civil rights leadership was "out of touch," he charged that the road from segregation to desegration to integration ultimately led to disintegration. "Integration meant the disintegration of black institutions," he lamented.

Much of the ongoing development and health of these institutions had been dependent to a great extent on the productive input of men. Once these traditions crumbled, the doors opened to a parade of shrewd manipulators, who do not have to answer to an earlier set of community standards. Professional "activists" and other charlatans, epitomized by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, now sprout in every city and town, wherever there are vulnerable blacks to be exploited. An obsession with symbolism rules where common sense once did.

A straight line can be drawn from the Brown decision to the eventual inability of the black community to ward off the negative effects of urban renewal, the onslaught of drugs, and social programs that undermined the role of men and crippled the family. It might take several more "shocking" Supreme Court decisions, but it just might be that blacks, one day, will be returned, kicking and screaming, back to that self-respect so cherished by Zora Neale Hurston.

Klansmen were not the only people who resented integration. African-Americans who lived as serfs in the deep South saw Brown vs. Board of Education in a favorable light. But those who had thrived in functional black communities with strong schools and civic organizations--doing just fine without white folks--were understandably ambivalent about desegregation. Their misgivings rarely reached the mainstream media.

A notable exception was the black novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960), who had grown up in the "Pure Negro Town" of Eatonville, Fla., which boasted a charter, marshal, mayor, council, plenty to eat--and streets so peaceful that there was no jail. Hurston wrote that she was too busy eating well and sharpening her oyster knife to feel victimized by racism. Black liberals attacked her bitterly when she described the Brown decision as an insult to black communities like hers, which had educated their own just fine. . . .

Communities like this one faded with desegregation, which sent middle-class blacks scurrying to white suburbs. By the 1960s, even the memory of flourishing towns like Hurston's Eatonville had been erased, replaced by crime-ridden ghettos that 60s radicals tried to palm off as the only legitimate black experience.

-- Brent Staples, excerpt from his review of Toni Morrison's book, Paradise, in Slate, the online magazine; http://www.slate.com

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