The Hollow Hope

In one of my previous entries I said that I thought maybe the court should have taken more steps to ensure that the law was properly carried out as they intended, however in reading the opening to this article it immediately struck me that this is simply not the intended nature of the courts. The introduction summarizes several cases that occurred following Brown v. Board, and I noticed that these all come several years after the initial decision, but they pertain to the exact same issues, which means that the law is still not being followed as intended.

I guess reading this me realize that the problem is not so much their failures, but the inherently reactive nature of the system. Rather than ever acting in a preventative manned the courts are forced to act in a way that only allows them to interact with an incident after it has already happened. Legislature is supposed to be able to deal with anticipating the problems and creating law to deal with them, but even today, perhaps more than ever, it takes absurd amounts of time for decisions to come down about issues that have been issues for extended periods of time. I guess these readings did manage to make me pretty pessimistic as I have no ideas for how to actually make things better, only observations about how they are wrong.

The Paradox of the Promised Unfulfilled: Brown v. Board of Education and the Continued Pursuit of Excellence in Education

Greene's article here makes the interesting assertion that although Brown v. Board was the right decision regarding "separate but equal's" inherent inequality, the procedures used to solve the problem only cemented already racist ideas, and in some ways actually hurt black communities.

Greene first explains that many black teachers and administrators lost their jobs following the decision. This is due to the fact that in response to the decision many black schools simply shut down and their students were bussed to formerly white schools in the area. To this day there are far more minority students than teachers, and Greene shows numbers from many cities across the country that are a little astounding. Along with the lost jobs there was the idea in the shutting down of black schools that they were, in fact, inferior to the white schools, and the only way for black's to get a proper education was for them to learn from the whites.

It's very interesting to me, because while I understand how structurally it was probably easier for things to work out as they did, I never really considered the alternate ramifications that Greene explains here. Despite this I still have a hard time believing that the case was decided incorrectly, but it does make me consider the idae that maybe they should have spelled out in a little more detail how the desegregation would happen, and keep a closer eye on the process.

The Whole United States is Southern: Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race

Payne's article actually explains a really interesting idea, and demonstrates one of the core reasons that the field of Law and Society exists at all. In his article Payne explains that many people, both at the time of the Brown v. Board decision, and now, believe(d) that the decision was the wrong way to go about ending racism. These people argue that a simple change in law cannot affect the way people think and feel about a subject, so to simply change a law in hopes of altering public opinion was wrong.

The reason I found this article most interesting was that I find myself actually torn as to what the better way is. On one hand, idealistically, of course it would be better if these thing could simply work themselves out interpersonally, and no laws were necessary to ensure justice was served. If this had been our means perhaps we wouldn't have a need for institutional policies that unfairly push opportunity for minorities in an effort to offset what has come to be seen as a natural inclination to racism. However, at the same time, this law does seem to have set things in motion, and blacks certainly meet less racism than they did 50 years ago, which is not to say that racism is gone. I guess part of me wonders though, could we have gotten here without the threat of laws?