Editor's Note

Fifty Years after Brown v. Board

May 17 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision to eliminate racially segregated public schools. The Brown decision ushered in a series of cascading effects: the unrestrained expansion of the federal judiciary, social engineering by courts without constitutional or legal precedent, radical egalitarianism as a socio-political juggernaut, and the legal exploitation of human inequality as an end that warrants any means (constitutional or unconstitutional) to rectify. This watershed event in American educational and legal circles marked not only the beginning of America’s educational decline but signified America’s political and social elites’ obsession with radical egalitarianism.

The true educational legacy of the Brown decision is the triumph of mediocrity in America’s public schools. Sliding school standards, based on subjective evaluations of “learning,” “reform” fads, “new” teaching methods, and redefining “student performance,” are the culmination of ignoring or dismissing objective studies that emphasize the underlying persistence of the average “black/white” gap in educational testing and student achievement. (The fall issue of this journal will address some of these issues in greater detail, including a retrospective essay that is, in part, a personal account and critique of failed educational reforms in the post-Brown era, which exposes the intellectual corruption egalitarianism has brought upon our nation’s educational system.)

This actual legacy of the Brown decision is lost in the recent fog of commemorative coverage by the mass media. Typical of this uncritical reportage have been the broadcast features on National Public Radio, beginning last December with the three-part series on the fiftieth anniversary of opening and closing arguments in the Brown case before the Warren court by NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. In the words of All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, “NPR begins a series of reports that over the coming months will examine this decision, and how a half century later, the nation continues to struggle with issues of race and education.”¹ The root of the continuing struggle has really been the lack of candor and objectivity in correctly identifying the essential relationship between race differences, average IQ levels, and educational inequality. Segregated school districts were in fact the result, not the cause, of racial differences in intelligence and educability.  Nowhere is this truth to be found in any of the media’s glowing tributes, which marked the passing of the Brown anniversary. Newspaper account after newspaper account has blurred the distinction between “equality of opportunity” and “equality of result,” thus perpetuating the fallacy that racial integration will lead to “social injustice,” reduce segregation, and eliminate “inequality” of educational performance. To the extent that the Brown decision lacked any constitutional basis or legal justification, that the decision reflected in the words of one former justice not an interpreted Constitution but an “amended” Constitution, and that the judicial process bowed to reach the pressured outcome as a justifiable means to a socially engineered end were glossed over in virtually every news account as if such questionable methods were politically permissible given the desired outcome. The series of court cases relating to Brown eventually shifted the goal from that of a “colorblind” remedy to eliminate racial segregation to the court’s decree of forcing racial integration schemes (such as mandatory busing) on  society.  As Ernest van den Haag correctly noted, “…the 1954 doctrine [Brown decision] goes beyond prohibiting compulsory segregation, to replace it with compulsory congregation.”²

As former Villanova University psychologist Frank C. J. McGurk observed in U.S. News & World Report:

If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision, we will have to be more factual about race differences and much less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already, we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned, we have wished—and dreamed that there were no such differences. We have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to appeal to distorting propaganda for its support…. There is ample evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of Negroes and whites are equalized.³

The fundamental problem of the Brown ruling is that the basis of the decision rests on flawed social science research, and remains a fraud perpetrated upon the American people. Credible findings in social and behavioral science research that undermine the dogma of egalitarianism, such as studies of black/white differences in IQ and educational test scores, are either ignored altogether or desperately attacked. Nearly every news account continues instead to stress the claim that American society hasn’t fully “lived up to” the demands of the Brown decision to racially integrate every sector of American society—in effect demanding that a faith long since refuted by fact continue to guide the nation.

The editors concur with the views expressed nearly forty years ago by Dwight J. Ingle, former professor of physiology at the University of Chicago and editor of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, who concluded in an article published in Science, titled “Racial Differences and the Future,” that:

Those who hope for the equality of all men without thought of their biology should be asked, “Shall we aim to make all men sick or all men well? Shall we aim toward universal incompetence or universal competence?” The concept of equality is meaningful only as it relates to civil rights and opportunities. Otherwise, to aim for the complete equality of all men is an affront to basic freedoms and rights of each individual to seek self-fulfillment according to his interests, drives and abilities. The ideal of letting each individual move ahead in a competitive society according to his drives and abilities will be realized only if the individual is biologically fit for competition and is free from the almost insurmountable handicap of slum environment. This aim suits the United States, which intends to remain a free competitive society. The philosophy which abhors competition and holds that men are born biologically equal, or if they are not, that they should be kept equal by Procrustean methods, would establish mediocrity, not excellence, as a national goal. It is a philosophy which exists to the left of red.⁴

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In this issue of The Occidental Quarterly, we devote considerable space to the third part of Professor Kevin MacDonald’s provocative trilogy on Jewish political and cultural influences on American society, primarily as an evolutionary group survival strategy. The third installment covers the important and timely subject of the Jewish roots of neoconservatism and the current impact this political subculture has on American foreign policy. Professor MacDonald’s detailed analysis of a topic that is widely shunned by conventional periodicals merely confirms why an open and vigorous discussion of this issue is warranted in a society that values freedom and liberty, and rejects the coercive influence of political correctness.

Endnotes