The Supreme Court decision today on two school segregation cases is a crazy retreat from the national policy of desegregation set in place by Brown vs Board of Ed in 1954. Given the altered balance of the Court over the past decade, though, it is a retreat that is both totally shocking and not surprising. What we have is de facto segregation. Are we really ready to get back to an era of legal segregation as well?

There’s a twistedness about the justification for the ruling, where dismantling Brown is seen as a hopeful move that positively reflects the hard-earned progress we’ve made as a society toward colorblindness. The thinking goes something like: “We don’t need to desegregate the schools anymore because we’re not racists anymore! Any inequality based on race in America is a fading artifact of the sins of our past. We’re just not like that anymore. Inequality no longer really has anything to do with race. So let’s not continue to introduce skin color into the curriculum of our schools. The young people, they’re not like that today. Lets let the kids be kids.”

But, ladies and gentlemen of the court, your honors, oh that it were so! It is not so! Have y’all been down to the Ninth Ward lately? Anyone?

Some of the best most accessible and nearly realtime coverage and analysis of the decision can be found at Slate, written as an email roundtable by the site’s legal analysts Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger. In anticipating today’s ruling, Dellinger related his experience as a white junior-high student in Charlotte, North Carolina:

“It was just past midday when a knock on the classroom door aroused me from my post-lunch slumber. The assistant principal, standing just outside the partially open door, carried on a whispered conversation with our fourth-period teacher. At conversation’s end, our teacher closed the door and turned (in my mind’s eye, in slow motion) to face the class. Our distracted chatter dropped to a hush as we noted his ashen face. I believe I remember, 40 years later, his exact words:

‘Children,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘the Supreme Court has ruled. Next year you will go to school with colored children.’”

He concludes that email by underlining the insane logic of basing an argument for segregation on Brown, which is how it turned out today:

“Looking at today’s cases from the vantage point of the Brown decision, the idea that the Supreme Court would condemn the valiant efforts of the Louisville community is extraordinary. The people of Louisville want a community that is not separated by race, beginning with a school system in which white and black children learn to know one another.

“Brown condemned a system of Southern racial apartheid, a system of racial domination and subordination. It is the worst form of literalism to believe that the cases now before the court can be decided by the fact that the phrase “classifying by race” can be used to cover two radically different notions. Only by blinding oneself to history and common sense can one assume that the use of race to maintain the monstrosity of the Jim Crow regime of the South and the use of race to achieve an integrated society in Louisville are one and the same.

A couple years ago Michael E Ross wrote a good primer on Brown to mark the 50th anniversary of the decision.