Thomas Jefferson

On Monday, December 4, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider whether programs to promote racial diversity in schools should be continued or overturned. Over fifty years since the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in schools, it might seem hard to believe that the issue of race in education is still so controversial. Thomas Jefferson, however, would probably not be surprised by the inability of the United States to address race relations successfully. He wrote in 1782:

“Deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations . . . and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Although our progress in the area of race relations has been slow and often ineffectual, perhaps we should be grateful that we seem to have been spared the worst of Jefferson’s vision: the extermination of one of the races. Jefferson himself did admit that progress usually occurred slowly. He wrote to Thomas Cooper in 1814:

“Truth advances, & error recedes step by step only; and to do to our fellow-men the most good in our power, we must lead where we can, follow where we cannot, and still go with them, watching always the favorable moment for helping them to another step.”

When it comes to diversity in schools and in society in general, progress has indeed been made “step by step only,” but, as Jefferson would likely argue, slow progress is better than none at all.