School Desegregation / Integration

Today, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases (Meredith v. Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville, KY) and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District (Seattle, WA)) challenging the ability of public schools to use race as a factor when assigning students to schools.

My question: why does anyone think, in 2006, that it is appropriate to use race as the basis of eligibility for ANYTHING?

While desegregation might have been a necessary tool to jerk America out of the Jim Crow south in the 1950s and 1960s, those days are long since past. At some point, we need to stop using race as a factor, even in supposedly benign ways and with the stated goal of remediating past discrimination.

Is it fair and just to bus kids (regardless of race) across town just so their neighborhood school can be "racially balanced"? No.

Is it fair and just to deny black parents the right to send their kids to a neighborhood school, if that is what they want to do? No.

Is it fair to give one kid the last spot in an elite school, at the expense of some other kid, who goes to a lessser school? No.

None of these things was fair, just or right when it was being done to black kids, and it's not fair, just or right now for anyone else.

Let's take race off the school application, the job application, and the scholarship application. Race should be as irrelevant as the color of one's eyebrows or one's height. THAT is the colorblind ideal of the civil rights movement, not blind adherence to a quota or preference system that is badly outdated.