The Legal Janitor

I have just finished reading this excellent paper: SSRN-Just Another Brother on the SCT?: What Justice Clarence Thomas Teaches Us About the Influence of Racial Identity. by Angela Onwuachi-Willig. It reminded me of a couple of arguments that I’ve had here and there, both offline and online about issues of race. I think the problem with social left-wingers is that they ignore facts and evidence that runs contrary to their dogma, and castigates anyone who holds alternate views based on those facts. Personal attacks are not uncommon among the frothy-mouthed fringe of the lunatic left.

For example, in a discussion about school desegregation in the US, I said:

For instance, while it may not have been often raised, it must be noted that a not insignificant minority of blacks actively opposed desgregation…

Actually, there is a case to argue for maintaining segregation, at least a voluntary one. Before desegregation, there were quite a few prominent private all-black colleges, with illustrious histories and faculties. I might also add that these were not the province of rich people.

Given that these colleges were completely run and controlled by the blacks, you could see how they?d rather not become the minority in a public school system, were they have to relinquish control over their culture, traditions and syllabi… Of course, many of these colleges disappeared, or were subsumed into other college systems after desegregation.

Would you not consider that a loss? As well as the rights of those blacks who did not want to be forced into a desegragated system?

To which this guy sp says here:

It seems that you believe a significant number of blacks mourned the demise of racial segregation since it allow the healthy separate development of the black race in their own space, that on the surface seem resonably well said but its the most fallacious argument that i have seen years after the end of Aparthied in South Africa…

…under insidious racial segregation, which you euphemistically presented it as ?healthy racial separate development?, they were not more than vulnerable second class citizens in the country. Those who in any way suggest that segregation is positive is probably trapped in the colonial era. Maybe you are the only person in this planet who buy the Nazi opinion that Apartheid is a good thing, that it is ?healthy separate development? and may as well establish ?independent? Bantu homelands for the blacks like what the Pretoria regime had done.

It makes one wonder if segregation had been so positive, Martin Luther King would have died in vain. And you claimed that a significant number of blacks supported segregation, i wonder whether those millions of blacks who participated in peaceful protests throughout America to support King then were Martians if your stand holds so much truth…

…given your perception of racial relations, the hallmarks of the 21st century would still be 19th century colonialism, white supremacy and Aparthied instead of emancipation, tolerance and self determination. It is indeed relief to see that your vision of racial relations remains a vision not reality.

In his haste to attack me, he has completely ignored the fact that running parallel to the civil rights movement was the Black Nationalism movement. sp cleverly invokes Martin Luther King, but he forgets Malcolm X, who responded to King’s famous “I have a dream” speech by saying: “While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare.”

Of course, ad hominem attacks notwithstanding, I proceeded to explain that I was no fascist Nazi, nor KKK adherent. All I wanted to do was to give voice to the much neglected Negro minority who did not wish for desegregation, who wished for self-determination in a system that was of their own devising, rather than of the Whites.

Indeed, Malcolm X expresses the feelings of many blacks at the time:

I just can?t see where if white people can go to a white classroom and there are no Negroes present and it doesn?t affect the academic diet they?re receiving, then I don?t see where an all-black classroom can be affected by the absence of white children. . .

So, what the integrationists, in my opinion, are saying, when they say that whites and blacks must go to school together, is that the whites are so much superior that just their presence ina black classroom balances it out.

Angela Onwauchi-Willig puts it succinctly:

In sum, for many black conservatives then and now, the fight was not for integration or against segregation that was by choice, but against segregation that was state-mandated.

Paper via Legal Theory Blog