Once again, the big, bad, white suburbs are victimizing poor, minority Chicagoans.

That’s the underlying logic of a class action suit brought against the state, RTA and Metra by a public interest law firm that hasn’t a clue about the Pandora’s Box that it is opening.

According to the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court, white suburbs somehow have hijacked the formulae for distributing government subsidies among the CTA, Metra and Pace.

Sounding more and more like his race-baiting old man, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. pronounced: “Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. came to prominence more than 60 years ago when minorities in Montgomery were being denied a seat on the bus. Half a century later, it appears that minorities in Chicago are subsidizing all transit riders, yet still not getting their seat on the bus.”

This, along with the lawsuit, is patent bull flop.

First, the suit presupposes that white suburbs are involved in a complicated conspiracy to target minority groups, somehow twisting a complex subsidy distribution formula to punish blacks and Hispanics for, I gather, riding black. Can we leave the tired 1950s bromides where they belong?

Second, the lawsuit is so amateurish and naïve in its facts and argumentation that it sounds more like a freshman Sociology 101 paper than a legal brief. For that we have to thank lawyers from a civil-rights law clinic at Chicago-Kent College of Law and the law firm of Futterman Howard Ashley Watkins & Weltman.

For example, in both absolute and relative terms, the CTA receives greater subsidies than does Metra. By the key legal measure of how subsidies should be spent, CTA bus and L riders have a higher percentage of their rides paid for by taxpayers than Metra. This has been so ever since the RTA was created in 1974.

As the urban affairs reporter at the Chicago Daily News and the transportation reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times, I covered the creation of the RTA and the controversies that led up to the 1983 restructuring that has the plaintiffs so upset. Maybe a bit of history would be helpful.

The RTA was not created as an instrument of white, suburban oppression. At first, Chicago’s mayor at the time, Richard J. Daley, opposed the creation of a regional transportation agency. Anything he couldn’t control was anathema, a view shared by his son, Richard M. Reformers fought hard for a regional approach as the only way to save train and bus service that was rotting throughout the region. (If you think mass transit today is bad, you obviously weren’t around then.)

But Daley soon saw the light; it dawned on him that if he could control the RTA, he’d have access to an Eden of additional jobs, contracts and patronage. The suburbs fought tooth and nail against the creation of the RTA, and, indeed, in a six-county referendum, it was approved by a scant several thousand votes—with the heaviest opposition coming from the suburbs.

For years, Chicago ran the RTA as if it was a City Hall department, and it was that leadership that led to the 1983 transit crisis. Suburban political forces would agree to yet another CTA bailout then only if there were RTA structural changes that took control of the agency out of the hands of City Hall. There was nothing racial about it; it was knockdown politics of the Chicago kind, a fight basically over control of jobs and contracts.

This geopolitical warfare permeated everything. I sat through hours upon hours of debate over how state subsidies would be allocated between Chicago and the suburbs. Should the money be allocated on the basis of population, total passenger miles, route miles, numbers of boarding passengers, average trip per passenger, and so on and so on? Some of the debate was well-intentioned, most of it political. Every formula had a built-in advantage for one side or another. Everyone understood that they all were fighting over the same sized pie; if your slice is bigger, mine will be smaller. Each was fighting for his own constituents.

To postulate that it was racially motivated or that was in retaliation for Harold Washington becoming the city’s first black mayor is bosh. Proving it in court based on actual facts instead of some hoked-up “data” should prove impossible. (Notice that I said, “should.” Today’s courts are apt to do anything crazy.)

The problem with the filing goes well beyond it narrow reading of history, convenient disregard of reality and factual errors. The pleading asks for an end to the “disproportionate adverse impact” on race, but fails to say how. Redress would by definition require the reopening of the distribution formula and possibly legislative change of the farebox recovery ratio to favor more CTA riders. Should a judge—and not elected officials—now make that decision? On what basis? There’s no guarantee that when all things fair are considered that the CTA would even come out better.

The suit also leaves out an important fact when it bifurcates the region into the CTA and suburbs. The Illinois Metropolitan Transit Authority Act, which created the CTA, authorizes the agency to operate in much of Cook County, including the suburbs (for the literal-minded, it’s everything east of Range 11.) And, indeed it does, serving as many as 30 suburbs, such as Wilmette and Evanston. Metra also serves some of those same suburbs, such as Wilmette and Evanston. So, for purposes of squishy equity the suit demands, are African Americans living in Wilmette or Evanston defined as a part of the plaintiff class? If so, should their Metra service be reduced to achieve some vaguely defined notion of parity?

Racial mongers make their living like this, separating the world into honeycombs of advantaged and disadvantage, victims and oppressors, black and white. This is the 21st century, folks. We should be beyond that.

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Dennis Byrne is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer