Impossible Desire: Parents Involved and Limits to the Victim's Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores the scholarship on the most recent Supreme Court school segregation case; Parents Involved. Many articles have appeared critiquing the majority of the Robert's Court's stance on the meaning of racial discrimination. This note does not give another version of that critique, but rather examines the fierce reactions the case engendered in legal scholars. It is, so to say, a critique of the critiques. I recast the debate about Parents Involved in terms of the victim's and the perpetrator perspective, a model borrowed from Alan Freeman. I argue that the critics of Parents Involved plead that the Supreme Court take up the victim's perspective. But would the affront felt by critics of the Robert's Court's opinion in this case be eliminated if the Court had adopted the victim's rather than the perpetrator's perspective? I argue that it would not. To the extent that what underlies the objection to the majority opinion in Parents Involved is a sense that the Court has done a form of violence to the idea of racial justice in this country, the turn to the victim perspective will not eliminate that violence. It would merely enact an alternative form of violence. In addition, things are more complicated because something larger than law is at stake in Parents Involved. At stake is a trauma and law cannot heal that. I conclude that the solution that the critics of Parents Involved have put forward is incapable of delivering the desired healing of old wounds.