Why integration doesn't (quite) make sense

First, how far do we integrate? To reflect the demographics of the community? If so, how do we define the community? As the neighborhood? The city limits? The county? The crowd of people whom a child is likely to encounter? Each one of these often yields a very different figure. And then, why is the white suburban child of Mississippi better off with integration while the white rural child of Wyoming is left in his uniracial isolation, hundreds of miles from the nearest sizable minority population?

Second, how does one combat white flight? If school board policies force a child into a school that his parents dislike, many parents yank their children from the school. White flight is, in one iteration, more forgivable: you cannot expect parents to be willing to sacrifice something as crucial as their child's entire early-life training for an obscure societal - goal - especially a seemingly statistical one - like integration. This is the "education quality" iteration. It can be solved by exogenous means. However, in another iteration, white flight seems quite reactionary: when a child is thrown from a situation of racial majority to one of racial minority, many parents turn tail and run. Indeed, it can be very uncomfortable to be amongst a race that one is not used to. But this iteration is much harder to solve.

What is fascinating about integration in education is just how pivotal it is for many children's lives. The recent court decision essentially - though not deliberately - denied an equal education to many minority students. The reasoning is that it is better to tolerate systematic disadvantages of many students (though students of a single race - this is important), so long as they may be legally escaped, than to inescapably disadvantage individual students. What makes the disadvantage inescapable is its basis in race, a factor that is no fault of the individual. But so long as school districts may consider race as one of many factors, or proxy in some other (still arbitrary) factor like residential location, individuals will still be inescapably disadvantaged arbitrarily (i.e., by no fault of their own) - though not directly by labeling them by race. Therefore the ruling may effectively eliminate the effective opportunity of children of a minority race to achieve an equal education, in order to reduce the likelihood that a white child will too - but explicitly because of race.

So it seems like there is something naggingly wrong with holding little white poor children responsible for the racist attitudes of their community. However, is there a better way? How do we hold a community responsible for segregation, if it is indirect and through public opinion? We must correct the inferior opportunities that are caused by undue, de facto racial segregation. And schools are the front on which the segregation in others areas of public life does the most damage - by entrenching, in an era when education minimums for employment are rising, disadvantages in other areas.

Can we simply dismiss and leave for dead integration, when the natural trend seems obviously toward resegregation? It seems to take government integration to start the dominoes toward a result that everyone, in theory, seems to favor. Very few parents in 2008 actively want to exclude black children from their schools. But they just don't want to undergo the costs of experimentation and transition.

I can't say I know the answer to any of these questions, but I do know that mandatory, individualized categorization by race does seem to leave a bad taste in the mouths of many. Perhaps Justice Kennedy's opinion is less incoherent than I originally thought.