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It was actually a negative sum game. Especially by the 70s, the whites were not actually hoarding any resources. So when you forced integration you made schools terrible for the whites because the kids were getting assaulted and the teachers were distracted by teaching students who were at a lower grade level, and you made the schools no better for the black kids. The forced integration made things worse for everyone in ways that were obvious and predictable, but the people pushing it were so inflamed by self-righteousness that they did not care, it was those leaders pushing integration who were morally in the wrong.
Like what? You don't just get to advocate for a situation where girls were getting sexually assaulted in the halls and then say, "well, they should have figured some other solution and then we wouldn't have to forced integration" and then get to take the moral high ground. Let's be very clear here because the rest is just window dressing: deliberately creating a situation where education is impossible because of kids constantly being assaulted and bullied is morally wrong, all the time, in every society. The situation created by forced integration was worse, and the people responsible were morally in the wrong, far more in the morally wrong than the people who supported the segregated status quo.
"Arbitrary" and "treat worse" are tricky here. It is morally wrong to overtly mean or aggressive against someone who has not wronged you. However, it is morally permissible to withhold charity, or withhold generosity, or withhold sharing, or withhold your friendship, or withhold permitting someone to migrate into your terrirtory, or withold wanting your children to raise my children (which is what school is) based upon limited, imperfect information -- such as ethnicity/race, or religion, or politics. Race, like family, or like in many cases religion, is not something a person chooses to be born into, but it is not exactly arbitrary either. Race is tribe, it is a measure of closeness of blood relations, it is not arbitrary, and something that is quite often relevant.
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