Orwell and the Gutting of Brown v. Board

Yesterday in a feat of rhetorical prowess, a majority of the Supreme Court decided to gut Brown v. Board of Education. Normally, when a court overturns a precedent, it carefully explains why circumstances have changed. The power of precedent (the Latin term is stare decisis) normally controls how courts may rule - even new justices Roberts and Alito vowed to maintain precedent during their recent Senate confirmation hearings. Yet . . . a little rhetorical criticism reveals just how quickly Roberts and Alito broke their vows. Two sentences should suffice:

Chief Justice Roberts, writing the Court's opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. (June 28, 2007), "argued" that: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." While repetition has been an extraordinarily effective weapon in the arsenal of conservative speak since the 1980s (a trick they may have learned from George Orwell's 1984), this one is so much a tautology that it not only reveals the absence of an argument, but also the conservative rhetorical strategy of repetition. Roberts may have thought himself clever, but a quick look halves his too cleverness.

My favorite rhetorical trick appears as well in this opinion - redefinition. Roberts argued, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." This is the most powerful of Orwellian exercises: the re-writing of history. An accurate rendering of history would read, "Before Brown, BLACK schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school." As Justice Stevens in his dissent noted, "The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools." Roberts and the Supremes redefined "schoolchildren before Brown" in a manner that conflates the Black and White experience in America. Stevens called them on their lie, let us hope the press informs Americans about the Court's Orwellian rhetoric.