Racial Imbalance, Black Separatism, and Permissible Classification by Race

The Article will begin with a discussion of the School Segregation Cases which have been invoked both to sustain and to invalidate corrective racial classification. It will then review federal discrimination against Japanese-Americans and against Indians, as well as the more obscure discrimination found in immigration and naturalization laws. It will also consider, in some detail, the paradoxical rules governing the discriminatory selection of jurors and, in lesser detail, the cases dealing with domestic relations and racial designations. A concluding section will discuss black separatism and general policy matters relating to the correction of imbalance in the schools. The Article assumes throughout that the issue of racial classification, which has the capacity either to remedy past injustices or to create new ones, cannot be resolved on a result-oriented basis. Indeed, in the field of race relations, in which action has ranged from assaults on Jim Crow practices to the drive for separatism by some Negroes, a result-motivated approach could answer at most the demands of this day only. But a “neutral” approach to the cases, it should be emphasized, is entirely compatible with a conscientious governmental response to the needs of black people and of disadvantaged members of other minorities.