Diversity: An Aimless Sunday Ramble
(photo from Millzero Photography)
I've got several streams of thought going about diversity this weekend.
First of course is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District in which the new five-justice majority
held that the consideration of race by school districts in assigning students to public schools in order to promote racial diversity violates the Equal Protection Clause, even though the Court had unanimously declared more than thirty-five years ago that such a policy "is within the broad discretionary authority of school authorities."
Roberts, Alito and the Rule of Law by Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago Law School professor and most recently the author of War and Liberty: An American Dilemma.
The New York Times tried to put a good face on the case this morning by quoting law professor Michael J. Klarman who argues that Brown v. Board of Education didn't really end desegregation -- the Johnson administration did when it committed itself to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and H.E.W. threatened to cut off financing to segregated schools. See Jeffrey Rosen's Can a Law Change a Society?
Professor Klarman concluded by opining that "we're headed toward an ambiguous place where we're committed both to color-blindness and to diversity in public life" and that Seattle School District wouldn't "make much difference either way."
I guess that's as rosy as a liberal can get about the demise of the most important Supreme Court opinion in race relations in the country's history -- whether it delivered de-segregation "with all deliberate speed or not." Brown v. Board has its own U.S. government National Historic Site for goodness sakes! Are they going to dismantle it?
Being an optimist, I was recounting Professor Klarman's view to my husband on our way to today's Dodger game (how All American is that?). I suggested that American business itself had learned the value of diversity (see Professor Leigh Thompson's Making the Team) so maybe Klarman was right and Seattle School District wasn't as bleak a moment in U.S. Constitutional history as we'd been assuming. None of which convinced him of anything other than to confirm his view of my unfortunate tendency to tear a silver lining from every dark cloud.
Bio-DIVERSITY, Get It?
Then I remembered our neighbor, Tony -- the astral-orbital engineer -- you know, a guy who throws satellites up into space. The one who wears a t-shirt that says "Yes, I AM a Rocket Scientist."
Tony and I were talking about diversity in business one afternoon while he was fixing something or other -- the plumbing or the electricity (oh, the luxury of having a rocket scientist next door). Finally, he turned to me, wrench in hand and said "BIO-DIVERSITY, get it?" /*
All of which takes me to the ADR Diversity Blog, which seems so full of any number of great things that I can hardly get my brain around it. I'm certain to spend some considerable amount of time poking around its corners when I'm not about to sit down for my Sunday evening's guilty pleasure -- Entourage.
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* Tony's point? In the absence of biological diversity, life on earth would be quite impossible and we (humans) have repeatedly shown ourselves incapable of mimicking it ourselves. See Wikipedia's entry, Biodiversity.
Biodiversity provides many ecosystem services that are often not readily visible. It plays a part in regulating the chemistry of our atmosphere and water supply. Biodiversity is directly involved in recycling nutrients and providing fertile soils. Experiments with controlled environments have shown that humans cannot easily build ecosystems to support human needs; for example insect pollination cannot be mimicked by man-made construction, and that activity alone represents tens of billions of dollars in ecosystem services per annum to mankind.
