We spent a lot of time at our town swim club this weekend. It’s not my favorite place. Redheads don’t like the sun. Antsy, hyper-active adults have trouble sitting on a lawn chair for longer than a five minute stretch. But the cool parents invited us to their pizza party on Saturday night, and we had a birthday party for Jonah’s buddies there on Sunday morning. So, while I nervously paced around the lounge area, too hyper to sit still, I checked out the crowd of families sitting at picnic benches and applying sunscreen to their kids’ shoulders.

It was a sea of white with one black family in the midst. The black kids splashed happily in the water with their white counterparts. The family blended in with the white families on blankets surrounding them. The woman wore the obligatory Lands End bathing suit and pulled food from the obligatory cooler. But they were alone in the sea of white.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that schools cannot use race as a factor in school assignments. Scott Lemieux has some excellent posts about the legal decision itself. Let’s just talk about the problems with public policy and diversity.

Jeff Rosen had a good article in Sunday’s Times, which discussed the Brown v. Board of Ed debunkers – those that think Brown had little positive impact on segregation by itself.

“Brown didn’t transform society very much, and to the extent that it did it was indirect,” says Mr. Klarman, who is a law professor at the University of Virginia. “Brown brought out the worst in White Supremacy, and Northerners were appalled by the police dogs they saw on television, and that advanced the civil rights movement.” He argues that meaningful desegregation didn’t occur until the Johnson administration’s Justice Department became committed to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off financing to school districts that refused to integrate.

Professor Klarman said he believed that just as the court couldn’t bring about integration on its own in 1954, so it won’t be able to mandate colorblindness on its own today. “Just as Brown produced massive resistance in the South and therefore had little impact on desegregation for a decade, this decision is going to be similarly inconsequential,” he says. “This affects only the tiny percentage of school districts that use race to assign students, and even in those districts, like Louisville and Seattle, it won’t be consequential because there are so many opportunities for committed school boards to circumvent it.”

In light of the recent research by Bob Putnam, I think this assessment is pretty correct. People don’t like change, don’t really want diversity. One law alone can’t alter that really annoying aspect of human nature.

Look at our swim club. Look at our schools. White, white, white. Middle class down the line. The few Mexicans in town who walk to the supermarket with their kids in strollers are viewed with suspicion by the SUVs who speed past them. At our pizza party on Saturday, one mom told me that the middle school might offer Chinese as a foreign language next year. A man piped up from the next lawn chair, "they need to learn English."

To really achieve diversity, there has to be more one law on the books aimed at getting towards that goal. People can too easily wiggle around one law. You tell them that their kids have to bused, then they’ll send their kids to private schools. It also has to be about more than just diversity of skin color, but diversity of economic classes. I’m not sure even if schools should be the place to push the diversity agenda. Why not housing?

I’m also not sure if diversity laws are the right goal. Why don’t we have more black families in our town? There’s no law barring them from buying homes. Nobody shunned the black family at the pool. We don’t have more black families, because the homes are too expensive. We also don’t have many poor Albanians, Chinese, or Columbians.

I like the idea of diversity, but I like the idea of economic equality more. I do think that Walter Benn Michaels was on the right track though he didn’t have enough follow through on the economic equality part of his book. (Here’s a link to his book.) I’m not sure America is ready for any real commitment to dealing with poverty or diversity or whatever you want to call it, but I think the lesson of Brown is that one law isn’t enough.