The Brown Dog That Didn’t Bark

I can’t let all the “legacy of Brown” celebration/lamentation fade away without noting a point (which I’ve made several times in the past, such as here, here, and here) that none of them made: those who support racial preferences actually are following Plessy v. Ferguson, not Brown.

The meaning of Brown is that there can be no “separate but equal” because separation on the basis of race is inherently unequal, and hence that official classification by race is a violation of equal protection. The holding in Plessy, by contrast, was that the Constitution does not require colorblindness (as Justice John Marshall Harlan argued so eloquently in his dissent), and hence that racial discrimination can be reasonable and thus constitutional.