On, of all things, desegregation

This week, after being sent nearly into a coma by a never-ending stream of AI-enabled, Studio Ghibli-fied normie wish fulfillment ("Here's me as someone interesting!" they cheered), I read a review in The Atlantic about the non-fiction book "Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children," which proposes that the US Supreme Court got it all wrong in deciding Brown v. Board of Education.

It was, one might say, not a great week for the brain.

The Supreme Court is best understood as a constant national embarrassment (Dred Scott v. Sanford, Korematsu v. United States, Clarence Thomas), but in 1954, all nine justices aligned around a historically uncharacteristic (as in, good) ruling: The racial segregation laws that held up "separate but equal" public school facilities for Black children were unconstitutional. In a small loop of wonder, just months after the Supreme Court's ruling, Abon and Lucille Bridges would welcome into their lives their first child, Ruby, who, six years later, would be escorted by US marshals into the until-then bitterly-defended Whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.

I don't have anything particularly smart to say about this because there's nothing particularly smart to rebut. Arguing that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision in Brown v. Board of Education is, by definition, arguing in favor of segregation (even if the book's author would bristle at that characterization). This is such embarrassingly stupid thinking that I'm almost ready to call it conspiratorial: Surely, someone must be pulling the strings here to push such vapid non-thought into our lives, surely this must be the work of some unseen, puppeteer enemy.

What's more likely true is that this proposal is just as dumb, flat, and lazy as all pop analysis, in which the only accepted way to scrutinize something is to claim it stands as its opposite: Yoko Ono saved The Beatles, Abraham Lincoln didn't care about slavery, etc.

That said, I highly recommend reading Justin Driver's review in The Atlantic, as it better reports the enormous triumph and significance (and nuanced criticisms) of Brown v. Board of Education.