We must be color-blind, that those who are not can discriminate and we won't notice!

The Supreme Court today handed down a ruling that limited the use of race in school admissions, affecting my hometown of Louisville:

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. The court's four liberal justices dissented.

Yet Justice Anthony Kennedy would not go as far as the other four conservative justices, saying in a concurring opinion that race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.

To the extent that Roberts' opinion can be interpreted to foreclose the use of race in any circumstance, Kennedy said, "I disagree with that reasoning."

He agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle violated constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

The two school systems in Thursday's decisions employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they will attend.

Federal appeals courts had upheld both plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration took the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.

Roberts claims that he was following the logic of Brown:

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia joined the entirety of Roberts's 41-page opinion. Three years ago, without Bush appointees Roberts and Alito, the court ruled that universities could consider race in making admissions decisions.

...

Roberts invoked the Brown ruling as a basis for today's decision.

"Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin," he wrote for four justices. "The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again -- even for very different reasons."

The dissent claimed that, on the contrary, that this decision was a threat to Brown:

Justice Stephen Breyer, in a dissent joined by the other liberals on the court, said Roberts' opinion undermined the promise of integrated schools that the court laid out 53 years ago in its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

"To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown," Breyer said.

You can get a PDF of the full ruling from that MSNBC article, or follow this finely-crafted link.

I am kinda bemused by the notion that the justices believe we can achieve racial integration without paying attention to race. And this statement by the attorney for the plaintiffs is just bizarre:

Attorney Teddy Gordon, who argued that the Louisville system's plan was discriminatory, said, "Clearly, we need better race-neutral alternatives. Instead of spending zillions of dollars around the country to place a black child next to a white child, let's reduce class size. All the schools are equal. We will no longer accept that an African-American majority within a school is unacceptable."

Reducing the class size? How the fuck is that supposed to achieve the goal of integrated classrooms?