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

With these simple words, Chief Justice John Roberts closed his opinion last week in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, a case that addressed the validity of student assignment plans in Kentucky and Seattle public schools. A majority of the Court, led by Roberts, struck these plans down as unconstitutional because they relied, in part, on race in order to determine which schools children should attend.

“Before Brown [v. Board of Education], schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” the Chief Justice noted, “The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again even for very different reasons.” In short, he concluded, “the way ‘to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,’ is to stop assigning students on a racial basis.”

Amazing that such a straightforward concept is so controversial in America today. Predictably, some are already up in arms over the Chief Justice’s unremarkable observation that a people who rely upon racial considerations to make decisions are, indeed, discriminating based upon race. Justice Breyer expressed his outrage in a 77-page dissent that touted the need to be “conscious” of race so that “integration” might be achieved. Justice Stevens also wrote a dissent, expressing the “firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” (Really? Not even then-Justice Rehnquist?)

Commentators soon joined the fray. In a bit of hyperbole, one editorialist moaned that the ruling “cemented the future of public education as a segregated system.” Another columnist complained that “Thursday’s ruling opens the way for a return to inferior schools for minorities.” Predictably, an article soon appeared in The New York Times, lamenting the fact that school districts will be more limited in their “ability to use racially conscious measures to achieve or preserve integration.” Indeed, Times reporter Linda Greenhouse argued, this Court term has been “the Supreme Court that conservatives had long yearned for and that liberals feared.”

We wouldn’t want to admit that the Constitution requires racially neutral government decisions, now would we?  No, much better to attack those nasty, strict constructionist Justices standing in the way of the civil rights agenda.

This columnist does not dispute the good intentions of civil rights activists. Of course they are well-intentioned. But these activists also seem unable to hear the arguments that they are making. Indeed, activists have become so tunnel visioned on goals such as “racially integrated education” that they (ironically) have resorted to arguments once made by segregationists (albeit with improved objectives). Let’s put this into context: These activists are complaining because public schools can’t use race as a criteria for making decisions.

Apparently, racial discrimination should be permissible as long as you have a really, really good reason!

In his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan famously declared: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Today, civil rights activists claim to agree with such a statement, but their actions are to the contrary. Worse, they can’t see how their race-consciousness undermines the one objective that must be achieved if other efforts (including those aimed at education) are to succeed: Stamping out racial discrimination and fostering a color-blind society.

These activists are well-intentioned, but they have set themselves up for failure. More racial discrimination is not the cure to past racial discrimination, nor will it ever be. How can a society focused on issues of race ever achieve its goal of being color-blind?

But, of course, it can’t. And that is part of why Americans still see racial strife, even decades after it should have been gone.

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