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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 11, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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The battle to save affirmative action

By Vanessa Lewis

Over the last several years, a series of assaults against affirmative action have weakened it and put this tool for combating discrimination and winning political representation on the defensive. The attacks have included a series of court rulings, Proposition 209 ending city and state programs in California, and backpedaling by the Clinton administration.

At the same time, however, the progressive forces that defend affirmative action are also making themselves heard.

Reactionary offensive

Developments in the case of a white school teacher who sued the Piscataway, N.J., school board after being laid off while a black teacher was retained show the need for continued struggle.

The white teacher claimed she was the victim of racial bias. Her case was on its way to the United States Supreme Court. The school board—with the support of the NAACP, Black Leadership Forum and Jesse Jackson—made a $300,000 settlement to end the case.

However much of a retreat this may seem, the decision was tactical. The civil-rights forces believed that almost 20 years of well-established precedents for affirmative action were at risk.

They based this assessment on a pattern of extreme right-wing rulings in which the legal battle for affirmative action has been losing in a big way.

In the case of Texas vs. Hopwood last year, for example, Texas officials appealed a 1994 lower-court decision overturning an affirmative-action program at the University of Texas Law School. It resulted in a broader anti-affirmative-action decision that barred any consideration of race in admissions. Now there are almost no Black or Latino law students at UT.

This fall, the Supreme Court refused to hear arguments on Proposition 209. To some this came as a relief; they feared a national precedent if the Supreme Court upheld Proposition 209.

On the political front, the right-wing majority in the Senate is blocking the nomination of Bill Lann Lee—a strong supporter of affirmative action and a Chinese American—to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. This is the same position for which President Bill Clinton nominated Lani Guinier at the beginning of his administration.

Clinton, of course, then abandoned Guinier in the face of a reactionary campaign against her. Will Lee’s fate be similar to Guinier’s?

Anti-racists speak up

In spite of a number of blows, significant actions in defense of affirmative action have also taken place recently.

On Oct. 27 some 10,000 people took a stand in California, marching on Sacramento to demand the overturn of Proposition 209.

In late November, President Clinton’s Race Advisory Board, headed by the distinguished African American historian Professor John Hope Franklin, held its first round of hearings on how to encourage diversity on college campuses. Franklin announced that the panel would not be hearing from opponents of affirmative action.

As conservatives seethed, he explained that opponents of affirmative action are not interested in making the universities diverse and therefore have nothing to contribute to the discussion.

The capitalist media are reporting that racism is on the downswing. An opinion piece in the Nov. 16 New York Times by Orlando Patterson titled "Racism Is Not the Issue" asserted that "recent opinion polls, demographic data and academic studies [show that] race relations between Blacks and whites have never been better."

In the last year the right wing has made what it calls "racial preferences" central to the "debate" over affirmative action. This is the fictitious notion that affirmative action is somehow unfair to white people. The right wing tries to obscure or even deny the existence of racism. But in reality, the issue still is the very real lack of equal access to jobs and education for people of color.

John Hope Franklin told the Dec. 8 Newsweek: "I’m talking about opportunities, which African Americans or Latinos don’t have or some Asian Americans don’t have. I’m in favor of affirmative action but I’m not in favor of affirmative action that we’ve had for 300 years—namely affirmative action for whites.

"When I was getting ready to go to graduate school, every white person in the state of Oklahoma could go to the University of Oklahoma that my daddy was paying taxes for. I had to send to Oklahoma my grades from Harvard so they would send me my $100 toward tuition. No white person in Oklahoma had to do that.

"When they tried to set up a system that would create for Blacks the type of opportunities that had existed for whites for 200 years, they said, ‘Oh, this is terrible; this is awful, un-American, unconstitutional, illegal.’"

Capitalism and imperialism depend on racism. It took 300 years of chattel slavery, almost 200 years of wage slavery and a struggle in the streets to win affirmative-action programs for equal opportunity.

Barely 20 years of affirmative-action programs could not provide a solution to the damage caused by 400 years of racism. These programs are really just a modest attempt to rectify some of the wrongs—trying to put a bandage on a cancer.

Nevertheless, they are crucial.

Now 20 years of gains are at risk. While affirmative action has seen an uphill battle in the courts, the real struggle will continue in the streets.

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