Spinning NCLB "accountability" as civil rights: neocon girly manhood !?!

[QCao009@aol.com]

_Black is white_ (http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/black_white) 
Submitted by _Rick Perlstein_ 
(http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/user/rick_perlstein)  on August 6, 2007 - 8:55am.  
 
When I wrote about  the Supreme Court's monstrously mendacious decision to 
ban local school  districts from seeking racial fairness, I was especially 
offended by Chief  Justice Roberts' formulation, “the way to stop discrimination on 
the basis of  race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  
Historian Nancy McClean has now published an amazing little essay in which  
she reveals the workshops that churned out this Orwellian notion. "Roberts’s  
decision," she writes, "is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon  
conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then  carried 
into the nation’s courtrooms through their various legal societies." 
Here's the story: 
[H]ow did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its  
founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the  formative 
years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of the  Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an  alliance 
with the intellectual architect of “massive resistance,” James  Jackson 
Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s agitation against school desegregation as  editor of the 
Richmond News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s  most talented 
leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils  then working to 
crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist  organization 
in 1958, assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights  is the same 
as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in  the South “
entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting,  Buckley had 
editorialized the year before, was that “it is the advanced race”  so its “
claims of civilization supersede those of universal  suffrage.”
But calling the emancipation of black schoolchildren a "rape," and calling  
blacks civilizationally inferior, wasn't flying with the public. So they did  
what conservative do: borrowed from the black arts of corporation public  
relations. 
They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol, who  in 
1964 warned Buckley of the “political folly” of arguing against school  
desegregation “in terms of racial differences.” Buckley and his allies wisely  
dropped the racial rationales and most now say that they regret their earlier  
arguments.

But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight social justice,  
conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of rhetorical jujitsu. They  seized 
the civil rights movement’s greatest strength--its moral power–to  defeat its 
goals. They complained less and less that civil rights measures  violated 
property rights, aided communists or elevated racial inferiors.  Instead, 
conservatives claimed that civil rights measures themselves  discriminated.

“I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic  than 
the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered phraseology.  “
If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex,” intoned the  
outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it is wrong to discriminate by  reason 
of race or sex.”

The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true  advocates of 
fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s words,  as “worse 
racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern  bigots.”...
Yes: quite literally, they argued that black was white. Read the whole essay  
_here_ (http://hnn.us/articles/41501.html) , then groove to Nancy's _book _ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Not-Enough-Workplace-Foundation/dp/0674019091/ref
=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0698794-2006438?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186404043&sr=8-1) 
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of  the American Workplace.

 
Quan





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