AP: Harriet Miers’ High School Too White

Not to worry, America. The Associated Press, with its vast worldwide resources, has uncovered some vital information on the Miers nomination: The high school she attended was “all-white.”

And because of this, “Miers (Was) Isolated From Social Turmoil As Teen.” So says the title of the latest in the AP’s series of insightful articles on the possible Supreme Court Associate Justice.

Harriet Miers spent her teens in an all-white high school far removed from the racial and social upheaval of the early 1960s, consumed instead with academics, tennis and even a stint as the school newspaper's assistant sports editor.

In what may be an astonishing coincidence--and one that must surely influence one’s judicial fitness--the AP found that Chief Justice John Roberts also grew up in a “nearly all-white” atmosphere!

After all, what are the odds that two children raised in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s in Texas and Indiana would have escaped the “racial and social upheaval” which the AP seems to consider so necessary to the formation of future jurists?

If one were to follow the twisted logic of Matt Slagle and other AP writers (one of whom also found Roberts too Catholic), the lack of a childhood tinged with racial controversy or “social turmoil” would somehow disqualify nominees from serving on the High Court.

But racial integration had not reached Hillcrest, a three-year school that's still housed in the same large brick building in suburban north Dallas. It would be four years -- 1967 -- before Dallas schools were desegregated. Cultural changes in dress and lifestyle also remained on a distant horizon.

So first Roberts and now Miers are to be judged by the circumstances into which they were born; times and places untouched by the character-building “cultural changes” wrought by the hippie generation. Sounds like a factor in their favor.