The Supreme Court decision in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson that proclaims public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student's race is largely irrelevant to Baltimore, which has one of the most segregated school systems in America.
Baltimore, like most other urban systems in the United States, is just the extreme of the larger trend of school segregation in America.
The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2001 that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.
In 2002, according to Harvard University's Civil Rights Project, Baltimore schools ranked No. 1 in "black isolation." That is, it found that students who attend Baltimore schools have the "lowest exposure to whites" among the 239 school districts in the United States with enrollment greater than 25,000.
But the court's June 28 decision, handed down a little more than 53 years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, has no bearing on the hyper-segregated schools in Baltimore because the goal of integration for urban districts like Baltimore has been utterly abandoned for years - if it was ever attempted at all.
We have come to accept a separate and isolated public education system as normal, as a natural course of events. And now, with the court's decision, our indifference and acceptance of segregation has the force of law because the state may not even consider racial integration as a public good to be sought. The Roberts court says the U.S. Constitution is colorblind - and thus citizens may turn a blind eye to the racial separateness we see before us.
Both the majority and the dissenters in the 5-4 ruling cited Brown v. Board of Education in their arguments. This is not surprising; Brown has taken on iconic status in what can be called the moral imagination of America. Like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or even the preamble to the Constitution, Brown v. Board is a rhetorical centerpiece of what we like to think is the ethical core of being an American.
"We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," said Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1954 decision. More than a half-century later, everyone pays homage to this vision of America.
Chief Justice Roberts says that in 2007, the majority decision in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson is "more faithful to the heritage of Brown." Dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer holds that "we have not yet realized the promise of Brown."
Yet here in Baltimore, the "heritage" or "promise" of Brown, this judicial homage, has become irrelevant. Our moral imagination is bounded by separateness, a separateness that we have come to take for granted. Our ethical core is to argue strenuously now that separate not only can be equal, but in our day, it already is. Those urban kids in those urban schools can achieve too. Those black kids in their black schools can achieve too.
If it may please the court, this is our America now.
Michael Corbin teaches at the Academy for College and Career Exploration, an innovation public high school in Baltimore that is part of the high school reform effort. His e-mail is mcx5@verizon.net.