A Thorough Supreme Court Ass Kicking

It is a well known fact that racism is the core of the middle class's dumbness, whether you're talking the 1830s, the 1880s, 1980s, or today. After a temporary recovery in the 1950s and 1960s, our beloved m-c got stupid again during school segregation and the great busing backlashes in Boston, L.A., and lots of other places. That is, they took their eye off the economic ball. They started to think that their biggest problem was black kids in the school down the street. Yes the long bus rides were in fact terrible - leave it to us to make desegregation as nasty as possible. But the white middle-class went way overboard, started hating public school and public stuff in general and voting for Prop 13 and starving the social services that had created the middle-class to begin with, taking their kids out of public schools and then not wanting to pay for them, and deciding to get the black people off welfare and complaining about how only Mexicans used the county hospital so why should they pay for that shit? Whoops, goodbye affordable health care for you too, pal.

Today the Supreme Court majority continued the dumbness (conservative rule requires it) by declaring desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville schools to be unconstitutional. Everyone will focus on Chief Justice Roberts majority opinion, which did win after all. But the amazing work on the case is actually Justice Breyer's dissent, which will go down as one of the great Supreme Court opinions on race in America since Brown v. Board. Breyer offers a devastating deployment of the actual history of the desegregation efforts of the districts in question (and their enemies), a relentless evisceration of the taboo against race-consciousness based on the SC's own decisions, plus a fairly amazing survey of many many desegregation plans showing how any success depends on some kind of race consciousness, and show that anyway all that crap Justice Kennedy says they should try - they already tried it.

Read it and get your brain back. (Breyer starts at browser page 109 of 185.) The m-c would do a lot better if it lined up with this.

Yes Anna Nicole Smith WAS a big Breyer fan. There she is visiting the Supreme Court.