“Earlier than Brown, schoolchildren have been advised the place they may and couldn’t go to high school primarily based on the colour of their pores and skin,” the chief justice wrote in Dad and mom Concerned. Equally, in College students for Honest Admissions, Roberts writes that in Brown, the court docket had lastly decided that “The time for making distinctions primarily based on race had handed.”
The problem right here is that Brown v. Board of Training was not about states making distinctions primarily based on race. The query earlier than the court docket was whether or not state governments may use racial classifications to separate Black Individuals from white Individuals with the intention to deny rights to the previous and lengthen privileges to the latter. The query, in different phrases, was whether or not racism was a official state curiosity.
“Brown didn’t elevate the difficulty of whether or not states may use race-conscious classifications to combine colleges,” wrote the authorized scholar Joel Okay. Goldstein in a 2008 evaluation and critique of Roberts’ opinion in Dad and mom Concerned. “With one pertinent exception, the briefs and oral arguments centered totally on the best way during which the federal government then used racial classifications — to segregate and demean blacks.”
I wish to spotlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a chief instance of “racecraft,” the time period coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to explain the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) right into a set of qualities or traits (race).
Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, one thing an aggressor does, into race, one thing the goal is, in a sleight of hand that’s straightforward to overlook.” They provide a helpful and pertinent instance:
Think about the assertion “black Southerners have been segregated due to their pores and skin coloration”— a wonderfully pure sentence to the ears of most Individuals, who are likely to overlook its bizarre causality. However in that sentence, segregation disappears because the doing of segregationists, after which, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of just one a part of the segregated entire.
This, you may say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social management, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that’s, race. A landmark case in regards to the legitimacy of race hierarchy — Brown v. Board of Training — turns into, in Roberts’s palms, a case about using race in class placement.
