As I understand it, the Brown decision did not order racially mixed schools. It ordered the removal of laws and policies prohibiting racially mixed schools. The principle it upheld was racial nondiscrimination. I originally supported busing because I assumed that busing was a temporary (like, maybe a decade or two) remedy to the despicable enforced racial segregation of the schools at the time, not a permanent practice to achieve some ideal racial mix in every school.

What the Seattle and Louisville school districts mandated was not simply integration but an ideal racial balance in every school dreamed up by some school district bureaucrats. Had Joshua been allowed to go where his mother requested, no one would have been denied the chance to attend a school made up of kids of different races, just not in the racial proportions the school district race police thought best.

The real educational problems faced by black kids today are not lack of white students to sit by but a shortage of good teachers, inadequate choice, lack of order, and a pernicious subculture that derides educational achievement. Despite what would-be social engineers think is best for everyone, most parents of all races, given a choice between racially balanced schools and safe, intellectually demanding schools, would choose the latter. In the wake of this decision, perhaps the education establishment can now focus on trying to provide first class educations to all children instead of wasting resources on rearranging the seating chart on the Titanic we call public education. For the most part, children from upper class and upper middle class homes are sent to private schools because their parents want them to have the best education, not because they don’t want them to sit next to a kid of another race. This is not 1954, or 1964, or even 1974. Dellinger cannot get past the horrific abuses he observed during those years to see what the problems are in 2007.

Justice Thomas suffered the abuses that Dellinger observed from a distance, and he is much more in touch with the reality of what happened then and what is happening now. He said:

Brown I did not say that "racially isolated" schools were inherently inferior; the harm that it identified was tied purely to de jure segregation, not de facto segregation. Indeed, Brown I itself did not need to rely upon any psychological or social-science research in order to announce the simple, yet fundamental truth that the Government cannot discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race....

Given that desegregation has not produced the predicted leaps forward in black educational achievement, there is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment. (…) Because of their "distinctive histories and traditions," black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.

Would-be social engineers like Dellinger still believe that coercing people of different races together will result in racial harmony. Is that what we see in the nation’s prisons, where people of different races are forced to live together in close proximity night and day for years on end and where most of the convicts under age forty are most certainly products of busing and integrated schools? Walk into the lunch room of any integrated school in the nation, and I think you will find that many, if not most, kids sit with kids of their own race much of the time.

The perhaps sad fact is that America is not a melting pot. It is a fruit salad. But what’s wrong with that as long as we all have the right to eat in the restaurants of our choice, sleep in the hotels of our choice, travel where we want to, buy houses and rent apartments where we want to, and the Government doesn’t coerce us into doing fruitless and unnecessary things like riding a bus for two, three or four hours a day, wasting our tax dollars and polluting the skies along the way, because a Government bureaucrat (local or federal) is enamored of some idealistic but false social theory?

If you really want to use buses to improve society, segregate the schools along the lines of IQ and educational achievement: separate schools for the Brights, the Normals, and the Dulls. Let the bright kids go to school with other bright kids and give them a curriculum to challenge their innate gifts. This is the most under-served minority in the school system. Somewhere along the way, the same people who dreamed up these ideal racial balances got the idea that the dull kids should be in the same classes as the bright kids. Whatever this does for the dull kids, it certainly doesn’t do the bright kids any good. Lastly, everyone would be better off if we de-thug all the schools. The thugs should have their own school where perhaps they can be fast-tracked to their ultimate destination, the prison system.