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Redistributing Whiteness in Maryland
Is whiteness a commodity that can be allocated like money or social services? Maryland’s wealthiest suburban counties are embarked on race-based school policies that will not end well. Busing is back in a big way in suburban Maryland.
In the 1960s, my father worked on desegregation plans in Tennessee and Mississippi as a civil rights attorney with the USDOJ Civil Rights Division. He said there was an implicit understanding among those who worked on these plans about a psychological “critical mass” in white communities. That meant that when a formerly all-white school reached or exceeded a certain percentage (“critical mass”) of black students, “white flight” would ensue and the schools would rapidly re-segregate. As a matter of law, these plans had to be implemented no matter what because the segregation was de jure and there was no way to simultaneously mandate entire communities to exchange residences to achieve residential integration so the schools were always a principal focus. So “white flight” was widespread.
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If you’re like many Ricochet folks, you get “
Conservatives have rightly taken pride in Neil Gorsuch’s calm and cerebral performance at his Senate confirmation hearings. Many commentators, along with Republican senators, have mocked Democrats for presuming to evaluate Gorsuch based on the outcomes of his cases. Did he “side with the little guy” or with big corporations? The correct answer, conservatives have correctly chided, is that justice is supposed to be blind. A good judge makes determinations based upon the facts and the law without regard to whether he personally prefers one party to another and without some social justice agenda to equalize the fortunes of little guys versus big guys. It’s not little versus big, sympathetic versus unsympathetic in a courtroom, but facts and law.
Before our local Maryland primary on April 26 — part of the so-called I-95 set of primaries that was Donald Trump’s penultimate victory before his clinching Indiana win — I spent a couple of days canvassing for John Kasich and local candidates door to door, at public places, and at the polls in Frederick and Montgomery Counties. I’ve done this a couple of times before elections and have never regretted it; I always learn a lot about what’s on other people’s minds.
Last week in the 
In a scene that’s all too common in the Obama era, an American city is in flames. This time it’s Baltimore, where a funeral for a man killed by cops was quickly followed by mob violence carried live on cable news and social media. Every few months another Democrat stronghold is convulsed by turmoil. Hope and change involves a lot more riots and looting than I expected.