entitled "But This is not Segregation," published on Jan. 17, 1992, in The San Diego Union:

... My quarrel with the latest study (Status of School Desegregation: The Next Generation) is not its data, largely drawn from the U.S. Office of Education, but its definitions and conclusions.

Segregation, as the word is used in the study, describes the condition in which blacks (or Hispanics) outnumber whites, but not the reverse.

I'm happier with the definitions from my Webster's:

"Segregation: the policy or practice of compelling racial groups to live apart from each other, go to separate schools, use separate social facilities, etc.

"Desegregation: the abolishing of segregation of the races (in public schools, etc.)

"Integration: the bringing of different racial or ethnic groups into free and equal association."

In the Green and Swann cases, the courts were dealing with conditions in the respective public schools which could appropriately be defined as "segregative." It follows that the segregation which still existed in those districts at that time offered a basis, or proper governmental objective, for the assignment of students on a racial basis to desegregate, coupled with the caveats in Swann. Swann cautioned that such decrees were temporary measures, that their physical effects upon students of tender age were to be considered, and that changing demographics were not a basis for prolonging the decrees.

Twenty years later, counsel for the plaintiff class in Dowell used the word "segregation" in a manner, which Justice Scalia questioned as now being applicable, which was similar to that in the study criticized by Mr. Raspberry. See above Chapter Four. The dissenting students in this hypothetical case have shown that the City District is no longer segregated in the manner which gave rise to the affirmative action which Green