Jeffrey Lord:
On Saturday last, the attorney general of the United States spoke at a segregated school. He spoke, without a trace of irony, as the nation celebrated the 60th anniversary of Brown v. The Board of Education, which, to quote theWashington Post, “ended — legally at least — racial segregation in public education.”
Meanwhile, out in Topeka, Kansas — whence the Brown case originated — First Lady Michelle Obama participated in a Brown celebration by lamenting exactly the kind of school at which Holder was speaking. “Many young people in America,” said the first lady, “are going to school with kids who look just like them.” Certainly that was true where Holder spoke: The student body, according to a report in Forbes magazine, being 87 percent black. Just 1.8 percent of the student body is white, with the remainder divided among Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans.
And what was it the attorney general said? Again according to the Post:
Holder warned that recent public episodes of racial bigotry should not obscure the greater damage done by more systemic forms of prejudice and discrimination….The greatest threats are more subtle. They cut deeper. And their terrible impact endures long after the headlines have faded and obvious, ignorant expressions of hatred have been marginalized.
The “public episodes” of course, are references to recent public dust-ups with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, basketball’s Donald Sterling, and a local official in New Hampshire who used the “n word” in referring to President Obama.
But what about those “more systemic forms of prejudice and discrimination” of which Holder spoke? The “greatest threats” that “are more subtle.” In fact, it is a very curious thing. Mr. Holder, after saying this, quickly — make that reflexively — went to the criminal justice system, a favorite liberal topic.
He was disturbed that the U.S. criminal justice system had “systemic and unwarranted racial disparities.” The tally at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, a branch of the very Department of Justice of which Mr. Holder is the boss, states that 59.5 percent of its inmates are white, with 37.1 percent black, 1.9 percent Native Americans, and 1.5 percent Asian.
Which is another way of saying that the black percentage at the very school where Holder was speaking — 86.7 percent — was more than 12 points larger than twice the number of blacks in the U.S. federal prison system. Yet Holder, mysteriously, never said a word speaking truth to power at this school. Instead, he ignored the subject of this school’s segregation completely. It was, as it were, the elephant in the room — and the response of the attorney general, not to mention the boatload of mainstream media covering his appearance, was total silence on the subject of the obvious.
So the obvious question: Why?
And the answer is as obvious as it is historical.
Let’s begin with the reason for all this recent celebration — the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. The Board of Education. Why was Brown necessary in the first place? It was needed to overturn an 1896 Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson.
Mark Levin succinctly summarized the story in his book Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America.
In Plessy, an activist Supreme Court upheld a state law that mandated segregation, and forced a private industry (in this case the railroads) to separate individuals on account of race. By failing to invoke the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court inserted its own segregationist version of what was just. Like Dred Scott (the 1857 Court decision that tried to write slavery into the Constitution) the Court’s decision would have terrible consequences. The doctrine of “separate but equal” was the law of the land for the next fifty-eight years, until the Court reversed course in the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education.
Notice Mark’s reference to the original source of Plessy — a railroad company in Louisiana. In fact, with the end of Reconstruction, the Democratic Party returned to power in Louisiana. The political party that had made its bones and based its power on the idea of judging and ruling by skin color — specifically that meant slavery — was once again in charge of Louisiana politics. One of the first things the Democrats in the Louisiana legislature did was to pass the Separate Car Bill, which segregated railroad cars. A Republican legislator adamantly opposed the bill, saying it had passed because of the “ranks of Democratic Senators who pandered to the needs of the lower classes.”
The states with the most segregated public schools are epicenters of liberalism
Why have Democratic state, Democrat big metropolis meccas returned to school segregation? Must be all those racist! Democrats.