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June 28, 2007
In Seattle, Diversity Isn't A Black-And-White Issue
As to the Seattle plan, the key paragraph in Kennedy's concurrence, it seems to me, is this one:
This seems exactly right to me, and it has since last fall when I first closely examined the cases for a seminar I was teaching. A very significant percentage of the enrollment in Seattle's high schools is neither white nor black. (Think about it: Seattle is a major city on the Pacific Rim; lots of folks in the Seattle schools are of Asian ancestry.) So it is very hard for me to take seriously the claim that the Seattle school district was seeking to achieve genuine "diversity" by making school assignment decisions with a "white/non-white" system of categorizing students.
This graph of the demographics of the Seattle School District makes the point quite clear:
Under Seattle's plan, a school that was 40% white and 60% Asian would be just as "diverse" as a school that was 40% white and 60% African-American. That's nonsense.
It appears that what Seattle was really after was not "diversity," but ensuring that no school would be excessively non-white. Perhaps there is a case to be made that compelling benefits flow from having adequate numbers of white students in all of a district's schools (as distinguished from the benefits that flow from true "diversity.") But I don't think the school district made that case -- and in any event, I'm pretty skeptical of the claim.
(By the way, comments on my blog are broken at the moment. I'm working on it. If you have something to say, though, you can always drop me a line: isthatlegal at bellsouth, with a "dot net" on the end.)
Posted by Eric at June 28, 2007 11:18 AM