Full Stop

My colleague, Charles Krauthammer, a formidable intellect, a wise man, asserts in the February 10 issue of Weekly Standard that the courts, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States should not be the architect of social revolution. He argues that those changes should percolate over time from the people through their legislatures and in life outside the realm of politics and law. I'm sure he's right about that.

I also agree with him that "...racial preferences of any kind are not only destructive of the American ideal of equality but devalue minority achievement and poison ethnic relations" and that Michigan's admissions policies are "deeply offensive to any notion of equality." I disagree that we should not "really want to win the argument at its sharpest and most comprehensive--the total abolition of affirmative action--in the Supreme Court."

Krauthammer credits the turmoil surrounding Bakke, the 1978 U C Davis Medical School admissions case, with giving us twenty-five years of social experience with racial preferences for selected minorities. We now know, he says, just how lousy it is, and we are shedding it as fast as we can with referendums and change in public attitude. I'm not convinced by this argument. It seems to me that the turmoil continues, and we are worse off for it.

If twenty-five years ago, the Court in Bakke had said forthrightly, that racial preference are forbidden by the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act-there is no exception for benign diversity, it would not have been effecting revolutionary change. The change was brought on by Bakke itself.

Krauthammer carves out Brown v. Board of Education as an exception to the rule that the Court shouldn't make revolutionary change. He claims it is sui generis, in a class of its own. I don't see it that way. In my view, the Court erred in Brown , the 1954 case which overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine approved by Plessy almost fifty years before. It erred there, not by introducing revolutionary social change, but by trying to be practical. The Court sought to ease the social upheaval it thought was likely to follow its constitutional holding that separate is inherently unequal and thus offensive to the constitutional scheme.

The Court had done its work by declaring legal rights, by deciding that governments could no longer by law allocate access to government schools by race. By hitching those words, "with all deliberate speed," to its holding, the court invited a social mess which has continued to this day.

Now the Court has a chance to correct the manifest unfairness of racial preference engendered by its own overreaching, its striving to be practical. Let it stick to the business of deciding matters of rights and laws. Therein lies justice.

Blacks and whites in particular, and people of different religions, ethnicities, cultures, income levels, etc. have difficulty getting along, historically. It's difficult to know what to do about it.

Your idea idea of "just letting it evolve" strikes me as naive or disingenuous. The law must regulate the relationships - put limits on behavior. Otherwise, passions rule. What law? Well, that's why we have courts and legislatures. Are you saying Plessey was correct and Brown wrong? I don't agree. They're both attempts to figure out the best way to do things.

Suppose, for instance, there had been evidence in the Brown record that black kids learned to read better in all-black schools--not an altogether farfetched notion--should that have been considered by the Court? The Court's concern for practical effect caused to add to its decision the words, "with all deliberate speed." Bound up in those words was enormous mischief.

I once asked a black engineer from Alabama I work with , " If the southern black schools had been equal to the white schools in facilities etc and if black facilities in public buildings like water fountains rest rooms etc would have been just as well kept etc would the blacks have carred about integration ?".
His answer "Probably not "

Hello, Larry. I haven't seen you around here for a while.

I have to disagree with your statement: Blacks and whites in particular, and people of different religions, ethnicities, cultures, income levels, etc. have difficulty getting along, historically.

I was raised in an all-white, Eastern European Catholic neighborhood. Then, we got bussing. They took us from the country to the inner city, to a school with a large minority population.

I had no trouble making friends, and my first date was with a (very attractive, as I recall) Puerto Rican boy (wonder what ever happened to him . . .).

Of course there was violence in the school -- I recall students on their way to class being "re-routed" to go around a knife fight -- but the violence was there before we hicks got there, and the violence probably continued after we left to go to the new all-white high school (seems the local lawyers didn't like their kids associating with the city kids). After moving to the new school, I found I missed the old school so much I tried to get transferred back there. No go, and I ended up graduating from the school that had the distinction of having the highest incidence of drug use in the entire county.

Barriers to relationships are artificial. If no one tells you, "You're not going to get along here," you don't go in with the pre-conceived notion that people of other ethnicities are somehow less desireable.

So now I have to ask: What, in your experience, leads you to believe the races can't get along if left alone?

Thanks. I've been around, but in different places.

First, I hate forced bussing. I think it's been very destructive on balance.
Second, I agree with you. Kids of different ethnicities raised together without negative input from parents and neighbors will probably do quite well. That's been my personal experience...BUT - and it's a big but...that kind of experience is only a small part of the real world. Negative input is very common. Also one can't ignore differences in available resources, i.e. wealth and parents education and social position. And one can't ignore prevailing laws. If forced segregation is legal, if schools can be legally segregated on the basis of race, that sends a message.

Whoa! Slow down! I can't keep up this early in the afternoon. :)

OK, first -- forced bussing. I had no idea we were being "bussed," neither did anyone in the neighborhood, For some reason, the local school board redrew the district lines, and a bunch of us hicks from the sticks ended up in West-Side-Story-land. We strongly suspect it was the "Social Justice League," who then freaked when they found out their babies were within the new boundries.

We got a new high school out of it, so I guess it was worth something.

This happened back in the early '70's, when the world was a little more naive. We had no idea what the kids in town would be like, we didn't care, we just went where they sent us. We descended on that school like snow on a cornfield, and we were accepted because we came in such droves that the only thing to do was move over and let us sit down. They had no idea how we got there, we had no idea how we got there, and we didn't know it was a social experiment to "force" integration. Had we known, we probably would have been far less adaptable.

I think the parents who objected to the integration would probably have been more enthusiatic, had we not been able to fit in. But we fit in so well (we went to their houses, they came to ours -- pretty soon the whole area was mocha) our parents felt there was a danger of losing our "heritage."

That heritage business is what causes most racial strife here, not the inability of the races to interact peacefully. If someone had told me my Eastern European heritage was being sacrificed for the sake of integration, I would have refused to participate in the experiment.

But my heritage lost nothing, and Carlos didn't suddenly stop speaking Spanish because he was dating me. Our heritage was separate from our relationship.

That's where we need to go with integration. Don't be so over-protective of your history. It'll still be there, no matter who you date. Once people figure this out, we'll be a whole lot better off.

Now, ethnic conflict in the broader sense.

I don't believe that all cultures are equally good. I can't accept that a tradition of virgin sacrifice is OK, just because that's what a particular faith believes.

So of course I'll be in conflict with the virgin sacrificers. And they will be in conflict with me, since I won't let them do it in my neighborhood.

That's the extreme. The more likely:

I can deal with people who don't celebrate Christmas, as long as they can deal with me. I think Menorahs are pretty -- I have no idea what they mean. I'm willing to listen to someone explain to me the meaning of Passover, and, nine times out of ten, he'll be willing to hear the story of Christ's Birth.

Overall, these two cultures aren't that different, morally. But we are far different from a society that subscribes to infanticide, genital mutilation, etc.

The solution? Don't interact with individuals who are so far off your cultural norm they set your head spinning when you talk to them. It's a choice. If I choose to live outside my customs and faith, I can't expect my adopted culture to respect my heritage. It means nothing to them, they have no frame of reference for it, and they're not interested in learning why I think it's good. Same applies here. Keep your faith, but keep it at home, unless it's illegal here. If it's illegal, don't do it. If you can't avoid doing it, don't move here.

It's all about choices. For every path you take, you leave at least one untaken. I couldn't be Catholic in Iraq, therefore, I won't move to Iraq.

Choices and free will -- we all have them.

I think the answer is to segregate trouble-makers.

I would agree with you there.

I believe we need to enforce the laws we have on the books already. For example, the law states that, if you use a gun when committing a crime, your sentence will be harsher. You will go to jail. Period.

Use a gun.
Go to jail for a minimum of three years.
No exceptions.

It's like parenting a willfull child. If you do not set limits, and enforce them, the kid runs all over you and the rest of the household. (Believe me, I speak from experience.) If you define your expectations, define the consequences, and resist wavering, your job becomes much easier, whether your a parent or a judge.

I once asked a black engineer from Alabama I work with , " If the southern black schools had been equal to the white schools in facilities etc and if black facilities in public buildings like water fountains rest rooms etc would have been just as well kept etc would the blacks have carred about integration ?". His answer "Probably not "

Interesting though I abhor the separate but equal doctrine in that it violates freedom of association by government mandate.

I thought about this when Cinton was on Larry King with a big booster for the United Negro college fund. The gentleman kept stating about the need for blacks to continue to go to historically black colleges.

A whole collection of things.

I think a growing population is putting tremendous pressure on the biosphere so I want to see everything possible done to stabilize and reduce it.

Julian Simon pointed out that - on average - we've been urbanizing a million acres per year since the founding of the Republic. It's worse elsewhere. That has to stop.

I think the decline in fish stocks in the world's oceans is a harbinger of things to come. I don't see Bush pushing that point of view nor gearing his policies to it.

What is encouraging is that on a personal level the President seems quite conscious of the need to protect the natural world.

You can't possibly be a liberal, Larry. You make your point in 5 sentences. Real liberals need five paragraphs (as I will prove in just one moment).

I don't have as much faith in the eco-sciences as I used to. I don't doubt we're going through a period of global warming, but I have a hard time believing that something as frail as man could cause it. I'd like to see a longer view -- one that covers millennia instead of just centuries. The world was much warmer than it is now, and since we've recently (geologically speaking) been through a period of global cooling, I'm inclined to think the pendulum that balances all this is swinging back the other way.

We're urbanizing our farm acreage, but we're also producing more per acre than ever before. We can convert farm acreage into subdivisions with no loss in yield. Acquiring more land for housing might not seem to be important here, since we have so much unoccupied land to start with, but this has been a real boon to Japan. They're so strapped for land, and so low on natural resources, every advance we make in increasing yields directly improves their quality of life. If we could get China, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and North Korea on board, we could virtually guarantee that the Asian world would never experience famine again. Given the situation in Africa, the more we're able to increase agricultural yields, the better off the entire planet will be.

Increasing yields would also go a long way to helping the oceans, too. Japan has been guilty of overfishing for decades, but, given the choice between emptying the ocean and letting their people starve, I can easily see why they take the short view. Once we can provide a guaranteed source of protein (soybeans being the biggie here -- tofu is quite tasty, and is already a staple in the Japanese diet), their dependence on the oceans for a supply of protein will diminish.

I think we, as a nation, need to slow down and really look at what is needed. On one hand the "band-aid" solution of taking over vast stretches of the country to prevent the loss of undeveloped acreage may seen the way to go. But in the long view, we need to focus on whether this land should be preserved as a place to camp and hike, or whether it should be put into production to supply protein to hungry people.

As you say, Larry, there are no easy answers.

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