Maggie's Farm

Sowell speaks out on the case now before the Supreme Court in which students, both white and black, are suing school districts in Louisville and Seattle for denying them admittance to the schools of their choice on the basis of their race.  The schools' motivation is not to remedy segregation, but rather to provide the "benefits of diversity" by making sure all schools in the system meet certain racial quotas for each group. 

What are those "compelling" benefits of "diversity"? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor's wardrobe.

Not only is there no hard evidence that mixing and matching black and white kids in school produces either educational or social benefits, there have been a number of studies of all-black schools whose educational performances equal or exceed the national average, even though most black schools fall far below the average...

Look at it another way: Have black kids bussed into white schools had their test scores shoot up? No -- not even after decades of bussing.

Indeed, the whole "diversity" concept only arose AFTER it became abundantly clear that integration and busing had failed completely to improve the achievement of either black or white students, and in fact was correlated with a substantial decline in standards and performance.  Needing some rationale to continue the experiment, the left created the concept of diversity - an ideal one, too, since its benefits can never be proved or disproved, only asserted as an article of faith.  Anyways, the Court should reach a decision by late spring.

Above, the author of 1954's Brown v. Board of Ed.