The Fugitive Slave Act, The Freedman’s Bureau, It’s All the Same…

Shorter verbatim Jonah Goldberg: “People say, ‘well, why should we be neutral on race when people aren’t neutral about whose family gave more money to a school and all the rest?’ And there’s a longer answer, but a short answer is simply that, you know, we fought a civil war over race. We amended the constitution a couple of times because of race. We had the civil rights act because of race.”

Since you did well in responding to a slightly more concise version of the same silly tautology from John Roberts, over to you, Justice Stevens:

There is a cruel irony in The Chief Justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The first sentence in the concluding paragraph of his opinion states: “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” This sentence reminds me of Anatole France’s observation: “[T]he majestic equality of the la[w], forbid[s] rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”1 The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court’s most important decisions.

I know that this will come as a shock to the nation’s conservatives, but if you’re going to claim that racial classifications intended to promote diversity or account for the effects of past discrimination are the precise equivalent of classifications intended to uphold a violent caste system, you really need to at least make an argument. It’s not self-evident.

And, if we’re going to stop with the mindless formalism, maybe we can start by asking — given this country’s extensive history of public and private apartheid — in what sense legacy admissions can be considered race-neutral.