My summary of the cloud of arguments surrounding Brown II.

    Big Picture -- I think Harris opens an interesting can of worms by making the courts responsible for their role in upholding what could be social inequality and making it legal and biological in some cases. Her arguments surrounding Brown II's failings seem to imply that the Courts have a responsibility to address this inequality, which some might find to be a slippery slope into using courts to address every inequality of circumstance, not just of opportunity or protection under the law. This ends up boiling down to questions of judicial jurisdiction. I'm not sure where I fall in that broader argument but I tried to lay out some possible lines of thought, starting with Harris' critique of Brown II. 

 Nitty Gritty --  In Harris' analysis of Brown II, she critiques what is typically thought of as a victory for racial equality, the breaking down of white privilege.  She summarized her argument well when saying, "Selecting desegregation as the sole remedy was the consequence of defining the injury solely as racial separation" (1755). The true injury was inferior education. That injury, however, was not addressed as the need for redress for constitutional injury is outweighed by the expectation that de-factor segregation isn't the realm of the courts. In other words, white resistance, not constitutional injury, to the Brown I decision is what dictated how Brown II addresses the injury. This was a break from tradition. Harris quotes Robert Carter, who discusses how, in the past, infringement on constitutional rights required immediate attention, not "all deliberate speed." 

      A possible counter to this argument is that the constitutional injury was not inferior education. The court was correct in diagnosing racial separation as the injury and desegregation as the cure. The 14th Amendment guarantees that no state shall infringe upon citizens' life, liberty, or property without due process or deny equal protection. Laws enforcing school segregation were states denying equal protection and violating the 14th Amendment. However, if the quality of schools continued to be correlated with racial or socio-economic lines, that was unfortunate but not a violation of the 14th Amendment because it wasn't state-enforced, and so, therefore, outside of the purview of the courts. Harris is correct in that schools remained unequal and that "all deliberate speed" was giving in to whiteness as property, but the court was correct in defining the injury as state-enforced segregation. Its remedy should not address greater inequality than that explicitly defined by the State. Some might argue that it's impossible for the State to be constitutionally held to address any inequality in education or other areas. 

     A possible Harris response could look like her and others' argument against Plessy. In Plessy, the Court argues that because they don't explicitly say that Black people are inferior, they are off the hook for any de-facto inferiority because that is a social problem, outside of the court's jurisdiction. Similarly, in Brown II's decision, if the state doesn't explicitly enforce any segregation of schools, then they are off the hook for any de-facto segregation or inferiority that takes place, it's not a violation of the 14th Amendment. The problem with this argument is that it seems naive of the courts to think that their decisions don't have the power to impact social issues and the responsibility that comes with that. Additionally for the state in Brown II...social problems are the purview of the state. They are definitely on the hook for inferior education systems. The courts could make a constitutional argument that the state is denying citizens their right to liberty when assigning them to an inferior public school, racial segregation or not. This hasn't really held up historically, but I think the argument is still there and Harris' argument seems to support it.