Discrimination is Good?

The headline reads Supreme Court Quashes School Desegregation. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot decide who goes to school where solely on the basis of race. It's a bad thing. We all know it. Or, at least, to hear the public outcry it is. According to the NPR story, it's "a clear blow to the concept of racial diversity."

The case stems from, for one, an event at a school in Seattle. A white family moved to a neighborhood to get their white child into a particular school. The school refused to allow the child into their school, requiring instead that she travel half an hour across town to go to another school. This, the protesters claim, is racism. Wait! No. They're proclaiming that it's discrimination against black people. Hold on. Once again, I'm confused.

I'm confused about the argument that government should discriminate on the basis of race. That, they say, is the right thing to do. That, they say, is more non-racist than the reverse. I don't get it.

I'm confused because from my observation most people who live in particular neighborhoods populated by particular ethnic groups do so by choice. Chinatowns are not Chinatowns because Chinese people are forced to live there; they live there by choice. Korean neighborhoods are typically Korean neighborhoods by choice. White people live with white people because they want to, and black people live in black neighborhoods because they want to. Admittedly it's a generalization, but I think that for the most part it is true. Most people prefer to live with those with whom they are most comfortable, and most people are most comfortable with people like themselves. That also means that rich white people prefer to live in rich white neighborhoods rather than middle-class white neighborhoods because the rich white people are more like them than the middle-class white people. It's not racism; it's xenophobia. Look it up. Human beings are, largely, xenophobic. They are afraid of the foreign -- anything that is not like them. If it's not a different skin color, it's a different language or a different religion or a different income level. It's not "white" -- it's human. The primary reason that predominantly black schools are predominantly black is not due to racism, but because black people have chosen to congregate in an area. The same is true in predominantly white schools.

I'm confused because I went to an "integrated school". In high school I was in a school that was part of a racial integration plan. Hispanics were bussed from the Hispanic area and blacks were bussed from the black area and rich whites were bussed from the rich white area and me ... well, I was a middle-class white boy who lived near the school, so I went there, too. What I observed, however, was not integration. What I observed was self-imposed segregation. Sure, we all went to school together, but the Hispanics hung out over here and the blacks hung out over there and the rich whites hung out across the way and the middle class whites hung out someplace else. Me? I was never given the proper training. I didn't know that I was supposed to be part of a cliqué. I didn't know I was supposed to discriminate on the basis of race or income. I had friends in all groups. Three of us in particular hung out together because we knew each other from church. There was me, the token white kid, with Clarence, a blind black kid, and Dan, a kid whose mom was from Columbia and whose dad was from Chile. They teased us, of course. They called us "the United Nations". I didn't think that was a bad thing. So we were friends through high school. We weren't "integrated" because of bussing. We were integrated because no one remembered to tell us we weren't supposed to be.

I'm confused because it appeared that the complaints center around "diversity". Apparently, and without telling me, the concept of "diversity" has become an absolute moral imperative. It is "good". It benefits everything it touches. Any attempt to block it is "evil" and anywhere that it is not will suffer loss because of its absence. I, of course, have never figured that one out. We don't want "diversity" in the arrangements of public bathrooms. Men's rooms should be for men and women's for women. We don't want diversity there. It's odd that most people are quite sure that women should be allowed to play on men's teams, but men are not allowed to play on women's teams. Wouldn't diversity be good there? When you're an engineering company designing a technical product, would it be good to have a white and a black engineer instead of two white engineers? I don't know what difference that would make. Now, don't misunderstand. I'm not against diversity. Exposing people in certain conditions to things with which they are not familiar or comfortable can be a good thing. I'm just saying that the present perspective that "Diversity is always good in all circumstances and those who disagree are immoral and unkind" doesn't make sense.

I don't get it. I don't get it at all. The NAACP is upset because they are saying that government should discriminate on the basis of race? Is that really what we want to see? It seems to me that the way we stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. And now that they have ruled that in this case the government shouldn't discriminate on the basis of race, that's a bad thing? Someone ... anyone ... help me out here. I don't get it.