Anti-Racism Laws are Temporary
Brown vs. Board of Education is Being Undermined as We Speak
Jul 5, 2007
A common sentiment regarding racism, in more recent times, is often a weary sigh accompanied by some variation of “haven’t we laid that to rest?” One can appreciate the frustration and exasperation of having to continually deal with such a pervasive social problem, over and over again. But the sad reality is that we do. If we believe that laying racism to rest is what we want as a society and a global community, we will have to keep fighting for social justice until we can truly conclude racism is no longer a problem. At which time I’m sure the sentiment will be expressed with emphatic jubilation.
However, it seems that the battles and struggles that our parents, and their parents, and generations of parents have fought and won are gradually and quietly being reversed right before our eyes.
Legislation instituted by the Supreme Court to ensure the unfair treatment of any American based on their race, that once enacted, we tend to forget about and take for granted, are not set in stone as we might like to think.
The desegregation of the American school system, paved the way for the landmark legal events of what came to be known as the Civil Rights era. Education is, understandably, often the foundation for dramatic social change and revolutionary transformation. Yet just over fifty years from the historic Brown vs. Board of Education and less than fifty years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the great strides towards justice that those legislative changes signified are already being undermined.
On July 2, 2007, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4, against school districts explicitly using race as a criteria in their attempts to achieve diversity and integration (Black Enterprise). In what Justice Paul Stevens described as a “cruel irony,” Chief Justice John Roberts, had the audacity to cite the original Brown decision as a justification for his act of what a senior researcher dubbed, “right wing activism.”
I remember being similarly astounded to discover that many components of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were likewise subject to change in 2006 and 2007! According to an article on Snopes.com, Voting Rights, we ought to look at this as a positive sign, that we no longer need the government to intervene to ensure all people are treated fairly. If we are at the point where this is true, then I accept we should not worry about failures to enforce or renew legislation designed to address America’s long history of racial inequality and the current iniquities that persist today.
Clearly, even to the most unseeing eye, racial injustice continues and it is a fundamental responsibility of all this nations institutions, the government included, to do all they can to address social injustice in all domains of society. We will never achieve the kind of pluralistic, humane society we say we want if social justice has a statute of limitations and an expiry date that ensures all acts designed to ensure what is right prevails, are little more than temporary band-aids.
