I reviewed Paul Craig Roberts’ coauthored book, The New Color Line, for Reason eight years ago, and made a point similar to Matthew Yglesias’ (see Eugene’s post below): “But the emphasis on Brown’s anti-democratic tendencies begs the question of whether the South, especially the Deep South, was truly democratic before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and the black masses finally were able to exercise the franchise. In fact, Roberts and Stratton never consider this issue.”
Also, on the question of whether the Brown decision was based on the Fourteenth Amendment or on social science evidence, my understanding has always been that the Court threw in the social science evidence as a way of placating the white South. Instead of saying, “you guys are racist pigs who have been oppressing blacks for three hundred years,” which would have been apt but impolitic, the Court said, “you segregated blacks in public schools at a time when you didn’t know how harmful it was to them. Now that modern social science evidence has demonstrated the harm, of course you wouldn’t want to continue this segregation.” This didn’t work, of course, as the white South would not be placated on the issue of school segregation. As Mike Klarman points out in his wonderful new book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, white Southerners were more committed to school segregation than to any other aspect of Jim Crow.
After Brown, the Court proceeded issue a series of opinions that invalidated segregation in public parks, golf courses, etc. These were short per curiam opinions that contained no legal reasoning, but they clearly didn’t depend on the alleged psychological harm attendant to separate education. Rather, they were obviously based on a commitment to a formalistic interpretation of “equal protection of the laws” under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Finally, one more relevant quote from the review: “In the long run, the ultimate victims of racialist thinking are likely to be America’s traditional scapegoats, blacks, who continue to be vulnerable to political demagoguery because of their high degree of social separation from dominant white America. Roberts and Stratton, however, myopically suggest that racialist thinking might lead to an outbreak of violence against white males. [!!!]In fact, white males have held, hold, and will continue to hold for the foreseeable future a dominant position in American society. Affirmative action itself, in fact, is a creature of elite white males: senators, congressmen, presidents, Supreme Court justices, cabinet officials, university presidents, corporate CEOs, and so on. Elite white males could also end it any time they wanted to.”
Comments are closed.