"You black kids need to stay in your black schools, while the white kids will stay in their much nicer white schools." So says the Supreme Court.

In a decision of sweeping importance to educators, parents and schoolchildren across the country, the Supreme Court today sharply limited the ability of school districts to manage the racial makeup of the student bodies in their schools.

And just like that the Supreme Court bitchslaps 40 years of progress to the back of the bus.

And if the people who voted for George Bush did not have enough reason to regret ever entering a voting booth, you can add that your vote helped to undo decades of positive social change by electing a President who structured the court to send our country hightailing it back to the dark ages.

You can hear the pain in the dissenting judges voices as they respond to what to them seems an almost impossible verdict.

Today’s ruling threatens the promise laid out in the 1954 Brown decision, Justice Breyer lamented. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he wrote.

Today’s ruling breaks faith with the 1954 ruling, Justice Stevens asserted. “It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” he wrote.