Back Again

My silence for 36 hours was not because I don't love you all, but because the power cord on my iBook (which belonged to the last iBook, not the new one) finally frayed its final fray, thereby rendering my laptop powerless and uncharged. Through the miracle of FedEx I now have an new cord, and am returned to the land of email and the Web. Sure was quiet around here for a few days.

Got Fallacy?

Ward Connerly wants to do away with affirmative action. What bothers me is not so much his goal--affirmative action is a vexed and complex subject--as his logic. "It is not essential that black kid sits next to white kid," he said, diminishing the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation ruling known as Brown vs. Board of Education. "That's where we went wrong with Brown vs. Board."

It's not about the seating, Mr. Connerly. What is essential is that the majority have a vested interest in the success of the minority. And having the black kid and the Filipino and the Latina and the Japanese kid in the same room with the white kid is one of the better ways to do that. If my kids are in a school, I'm going to move heaven and earth to make sure that every child there is getting the best education possible. Self interest is a wonderful motivator.

There is, to my mind, nothing inherantly wrong with an all-girls school or an all-deaf school or an all-black school--except where it makes it possible to neglect, underfund, and undersupport those schools. Where prejudice still exists (and the world's maybe a better place in that regard than it was when I was a kid, but we're not there yet, nor will will be for a long while) I don't believe we can rely on the goodwill of school districts and communities to treat everyone fairly without a legal push. That's what affirmative action is about, Mr. Connerly, not the seating chart.