The Big Disconnect between Segregation and Integration

Abstract

I. Introduction The hearts and minds of the American people have been won over on the issue of segregation.1 Flash back over the fifty years since the landmark decision, Brown v. Topeka,2 which ended legal school segregation, and reflect on the long and arduous effort to convert attitudes away from the longstanding acceptance of race segregation. It took a monumental civil rights movement, marked by marches, sit-ins, hoses, billy-clubs, beatings, dogs, bombings, murders, arrests and the myriad of memories and rememories we hold of the American Civil Rights Movement to achieve widespread acceptance of the ultimate wrongness of segregation.3 Today, only the most extreme groups, residing on the very fringes of polite society, herald the ideology of segregation of the races.4 American corporations, in preparation for their role in the global marketplace with an increasingly multi-racial consumer base, have been strong supporters of diversity for decades, and many submitted amicus briefs supporting affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger (The University of Michigan) .5 Recently, in The New York Times Magazine, several corporations collaborated on a lengthy article designed to extol the virtues of diversity and integration.6 Integration has been embraced as an unassailable structure in our society.7 The dilemma we confront as a society, is that while an overwhelming majority of Americans would cringe at the idea of a racially segregated America, America remains racially segregated and racial equality is more ideal than real.8 Even though there is almost no legal segregation in America, most Americans live in segregated neighborhoods,9 attend segregated schools10 and churches,11 play on segregated beaches, vacation in segregated hotels and resorts and many have segregated workplaces.12 There is an apparent theoretical disconnection in America between the evils of segregation and the virtues of integration. Our society accepts segregation as bad, but it also views forcing individuals to forego any personal liberty for the sake of integration and equity as unfair and illegal.13 Thus we have the "Big Disconnect" between the legal and social wrong of segregation and the means of achieving integration, whether that comes in the form of school integration plans or affirmative action. This article will take a look in broad strokes over the past fifty years at how America has progressed legally, ideally and really from the pre-Brown society that accepted the legal segregation of the races, to the post-Grutter society, which has sacrificed racial integration, and accepted racial inequality in the process. The United States Supreme Court (The Court) decisions from the popular affirmative action battlegrounds of education, business and employment will be used to demonstrate how the law and attitudes of the American people support the perpetuation of a segregated and unequal society, while extolling the virtues of integration. On several occasions in the past fifty years, the Court had opportunities to facilitate integration in schools, colleges and universities, promote equal employment opportunities and to encourage the participation of excluded minorities in the nation's economic growth. Instead, time after time, the Court forfeited that opportunity and rendered decisions that perpetuated a separate and unequal America. I contend that on the many occasions discussed in this article, the Court got it wrong. II. Why are our Public Schools and Society Still Segregated and Unequal Despite the Mandate of Brown? The battleground was set with Brown.14 Frankly, American society was not ready for desegregation in 1954, theoretically or realistically. Brown was the beginning of a revolution of thought that did not take root until the civil rights movement was in full force in the late sixties. It took over twenty years for Americans to digest and accept the idea that segregation was wrong, and it was not accepted without significant resistance. …