Divided we continue

...The most disappointing chapter in the book deals with speech codes...

...Brown's status as an American Ninety-five Theses is undeserved and misleading...

...Wilkinson performs this service well, offering, despite his lapses, a solid contribution to the growing body of literature assailing America's flirtation with disunion...

...And it serves today as a reminder that liberals used to believe in such things, too...

...Recent trends in academia, the courts, and Congress have transmuted government into an "endless racial roundtable...

...Einally, the book is marred by too many humdrum declarations that border on cliches and detract from a work of otherwise significant stature—"What we make of New America is up to us...

...Affirmative action, in turn, is incendiary because it rewards groups that "highlight racial oppression at the hands of America in order to bolster their present claims for preferential treatment...

...Civil rights law," he argues, should "regard racial separatism not simply as a moral wrong but as a barrier to togetherness...

...It is therefore reassuring that a book should emerge from the judiciary that challenges the Balkanizing trends in our courts and culture...

...They "cannot ignore race," says Wilkinson, "because the Voting Rights Act requires that the racial composition of a district be a factor in redistricting...

...Handed down by the Warren Court in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education is widely held to have been the proximate cause of the mass protests that Andrew Peyton Thomas, deputy counsel to the governor of Arizona, last wrote for The Weekly Standard about victims' rights...

...Yet the decision provided an important service in articulating a moral vision of a colorblind America...

...The growing acceptance of separatism fosters "a society where leaders neglect the need for interracial communication, where groups regard public resources as matters of racial entitlement, and where every minority asserts a special racial experience which others have not had and thus cannot question...

...New America requires new thinking on civil rights...

...It is time for conservative jurists to restore to this amendment its original mission, thereby reducing much judicial mischief...

...And true to the principles of that administration, Wilkinson laments that the country has turned away from the legacy of Brown in its acceptance of the meltdown of the melting pot...

...There is no one answer to this question...

...Like many on the right, he cheers on a high court that is increasingly likely to strike down racial quotas and similar offenses on grounds that they violate the equal-protection clause...

...Circuit Court of Appeals, was appointed by President Reagan in 1984...

...The high court's interpretations of the act have been a "mess," Wilkinson says, contradictory in some respects and patched together by badly splintered majorities...

...Eor example, he offers this remarkable verbal shrug: "To this day, I do not know whether the Simpson verdict was a racial statement...

...A more careful treatment would not have simply skipped over, for example, Stanford's limited speech code banning "fighting words," defined by the university as speech "addressed directly to the [insulted] individual" that "makes use of insulting or 'fighting' words or non-verbal symbols...

...Wilkinson not only fails to do this, he says at one point, incredibly, that the term "strict constructionism," like "law and order," amounts to nothing more than "code words" used by unscrupulous politicians to appeal to white racists...

...In One Nation Indivisible, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III takes up the range of racial and ethnic issues that affect contemporary separatism— affirmative action, immigration, voting rights, and so on...

...To enlarge their portion of the spoils, ethnic activists coin broad terms that lump together (under their leadership, of course) diverse groups that have far less in common historically and culturally than do, for example, black and white Americans...

...Divided We Continue A Judge's Thoughts on Disunion By Andrew Peyton Thomas One of the most cherished and vigilantly guarded beliefs of contemporary American liberalism is that nine white liberals on the Supreme Court started the civil-rights movement...

...originality in the area of public policy is mostly a recipe for disaster...

...It is useful for public figures like Judge Wilkinson to reaffirm the customs and ideas that once bound us together but that have now been jettisoned out of a combination of greed, ethnic pride, and intellectual negligence...

...In what could have been a groundbreaking analysis of the legality of these codes, Wilkinson briefly canvasses some of the speech codes adopted in major universities and dismisses them all indiscriminately as having an unacceptable "chilling effect" on free speech...

...It offers a pithy, forthright explanation of the circumstances that fuel the perpetual feuds over the Voting Rights Act during redistricting...

...Most original ideas are, of course, wrong...

...The chapter addressing racial gerrymandering is especially fruitful...

...The vagueness of this term invites litigation and rancor...

...Indeed, Wilkinson looks favorably on judicial activism when it suits his purposes...

...On the other hand, a recent Supreme Court ruling (in Miller v. Johnson) prohibits race from being the predominant factor, although it may be a "limited" factor...

...Conservatives should stick to the original intent behind the amendment, and the Constitution generally...

...For one thing, it was the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, as Juan Williams has noted, that sent outraged, united blacks into whites-only bus seats and lunch counters...

...Wilkinson organizes the government's separatist transgressions into four main areas: politics (racial gerrymandering), entitlements (affirmative action), bilingual education, and speech codes...

...Alas, those days have now faded into '50s nostalgia, largely because of what a half-century of jurisprudence has done to undermine Brown's vision of integration...

...In fact, as Raoul Berger, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has exhaustively demonstrated, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed with the narrow, clear, and admirable goal of ensuring simply that ex-slaves would be treated as equals before the law when their lives, liberty, or property was jeopardized in a criminal or civil action...

...At times, Wilkinson strains a bit to posture as a centrist...

...Similarly, the biggest criticism likely to be made of One Nation Indivisible is that there is little new or original in the book as compared with other books of its type now on the shelves...

...Wilkinson is too genteel to note that the two most offensive terms at issue—"Latino" and "Asian"—are among the most presumptuous absurdities of modern sociology, hammering together as they do peoples of such ancient racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity as to make such groupings worthless for anything except the self-aggrandizement of the activists who press the terms into service...

...Otherwise, the document loses all meaning and judges elude all constraints...

...In his analysis of constitutional questions, Wilkinson seems oblivious to the problem of judicial activism, the stimulant of many racial woes...

...Wilkinson thinks otherwise, as does the Supreme Court, which now finds itself competing with Congress to undo racial preferences that, however misguided, are after all democratically and constitutionally enacted...

...Wilkinson, chief judge of the Fourth U.S...

...blasted away the last remnants of de jure racism in America...

...But unlike others who have covered the same ground recently, Wilkinson makes his case with such a firm but reserved manner that one can see why "judicial temperament" used to be a legitimate criterion for selecting judges, before it became a catchall way of borking conservative nominees to the bench...

...The very term "New America" as a description of our racially transformed republic is itself regrettably dull...

...Lately, though, racial separatism has become fashionable, lucrative, and highly resistant to reform...

...State legislatures drawing up new legislative boundaries face a lawyer-enriching dilemma...

...There is much debate these days about what America means...

...Today, the amendment is commonly enlisted—successfully— by feminists, sexual deviants, and just about anyone else who has a beef with some government official or policy...

...The verdict was, of course, an unambiguous racial statement of a highly inflammatory sort, and Wilkinson's hesitancy to say so is odd...

...But the Eour-teenth Amendment no more prohibits affirmative action than it does the erstwhile all-male admissions policies of the Virginia Military Institute...

...Unfortunately, judges have had a lot to do with the transformation of America into this "racially obsessed Republic...

...Wilkinson's cursory treatment of speech codes is only one of several shortcomings...

...This is fair enough, but conservatives know that such a standard, by itself, is a poor measure of any book's worth...

...Most conspicuously, in his discussion of the equal-protection clause of the Eourteenth Amendment, he accepts at face value the modern tendency to conscript this Reconstruction amendment into combat against a broad range of social ills...