[ The Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation
and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark
of racism - race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race
hierarchy becomes, the use of race in school placement.]
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RACISM AND RACE – THE JOHN ROBERTS TWO-STEP  
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Jamelle Bouie
July 8, 2023
New York Times
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_ The Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and
social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of
racism - race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy
becomes, the use of race in school placement. _

Chief Justice John Roberts, Erin Schaff/The New York Times

 

In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion
in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1
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down race-based “tiebreakers” in school admissions programs in
Seattle and Louisville, Ky. “The way to stop discrimination on the
basis of race,” Roberts famously wrote, “is to stop discriminating
on the basis of race.”

Last week, in his opinion for the majority in Students for Fair
Admissions v. Harvard
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ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Roberts
echoed his earlier self with a similar assertion which I also
discussed in my column on Friday: “Eliminating racial discrimination
means eliminating all of it.”

Both lines encapsulate Roberts’s view that the Constitution is
colorblind and sees no racial distinctions.

One thing I noticed, reading both opinions, is that while Roberts may
mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial
discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. In both opinions,
Roberts underpins his argument with the court’s decision in Brown v.
Board of Education.

“Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could
not go to school based on the color of their skin,” the chief
justice wrote in Parents Involved. Similarly, in Students for Fair
Admissions, Roberts writes that in Brown, the court had finally
determined that “The time for making distinctions based on race had
passed.”

The issue here is that Brown v. Board of Education was not about
states making distinctions based on race. The question before the
court was whether state governments could use racial classifications
to separate Black Americans from white Americans in order to deny
rights to the former and extend privileges to the latter. The
question, in other words, was whether racism was a legitimate state
interest.

“Brown did not raise the issue of whether states could use
race-conscious classifications to integrate schools,” wrote the
legal scholar Joel K. Goldstein in a 2008 analysis and critique
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Roberts’s opinion in Parents Involved. “With one pertinent
exception, the briefs and oral arguments focused entirely on the way
in which the government then used racial classifications — to
segregate and demean blacks.”

I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a
prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians
Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of
actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race).

Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft
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The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something
an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of
hand that is easy to miss.” They offer a useful and pertinent
example:

Consider the statement “Black Southerners were segregated because of
their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of
most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that
sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and
then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one
part of the segregated whole.

This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a
system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists.
What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race. A landmark case
about the legitimacy of race hierarchy — Brown v. Board of Education
— becomes, in Roberts’s hands, a case about the use of race in
school placement.

To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that
there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to
rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the
Constitution cannot recognize.

The result is a society that continues to reinforce and reconstitute
these previous patterns of domination, except hierarchy is now hidden
from law, and what is a feature of society becomes, instead, a quality
of the people afflicted.
 

_[JAMELLE BOUIE [[link removed]] is a columnist for the New
York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers history and
politics._

_Prior to the Times, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for
Slate magazine. And before that, he was a staff writer at The Daily
Beast and held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation
magazine. He attended the University of Virginia, where he graduated
with a degree in political and social thought, and government.]_
 

* race
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* Racism
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* African Americans
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* jim crow
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* slavery
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* Supreme Court
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* SCOTUS
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* affirmative action
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* Separate but Equal
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* Brown v Board of Education
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