From Bakke to Bush
Affirmative action comes under fire
By Monica Moorehead
Twenty-five years ago, in 1978, the U.S.
Supreme Court issued the infamous Bakke decision. The court
ruled, five to four, that using racial quotas to help win some
measure of equality in hiring and education was
unconstitutional. Quotas are the setting aside of a certain
number of openings, mainly for people of color and women, in
the areas of jobs and education.
The Bakke case was centered at the University of California
at Davis Medical School. Now the battleground has moved to the
University of Michigan.
On Jan. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that on April 1
it will hear one hour of oral arguments regarding another
milestone case focused on the same issue of affirmative action.
This case--actually two separate court cases combined into
one--is known as Gratz and Grutter vs. Bollinger.
Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter, both white, sued Lee
Bollinger, former president of U-M, in 1996. They charged
"reverse discrimination."
Gratz and Grutter claimed they were denied entry into the
undergraduate program and law school, respectively, because of
U-M's affirmative-action program, which sets aside some
openings for Black and Latino students.
U-M's affirmative-action program has implemented racial
quotas to help create diversity by bringing students of color
into its undergraduate and graduate programs. U.S. colleges and
universities, private and state-run, that receive the most
funding, remain predominantly white.
On Oct. 29, U-M filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court
urging the court not to strike down its affirmative-action
program that helps achieve diversity. The U-M News and
Information Services statement stressed that a Supreme Court
decision reaffirming Bakke "would produce the immediate
re-segregation of many--and perhaps most--of this nation's
finest and most selective institutions."
The statement continued, "A prohibition on the consideration
of race in admissions could, for example, cut the
representation of African American students at selective
universities by more than two-thirds, and at accredited law
schools by more than three-fourths."
Bush administration intervenes
The Bush administration brazenly intervened in this legal
battle when it asked the Justice Department to submit its own
briefs to the Supreme Court supporting the abolition of the U-M
racial quota programs.
In subtly racist remarks, President Bush said, "At the
undergraduate level, African American students and some
Hispanic students and Native American students receive 20
points out of a maximum of 150, not because of any academic
achievement, but solely because they are African American,
Hispanic or Native American."
The irony is that Bush himself is a product of a racial and
class quota that affirm ative action confronts head on. George
W. got into Yale University even though his verbal and math
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores did not meet Yale's academic
standards.
His secret? He was the son and grandson of affluent
alumni.
Affirmative action
and anti-racist struggle
When Allen Bakke, a white medical student, sued the U-C at
Davis for "reverse discrimination," it was the first time that
a great majority of people in the United States had heard of
affirmative action.
Even today many people are unaware that institutionalized
racism has been rooted in U.S. society for many centuries.
Today, unfortunately, its legacy is alive and well in housing,
health care, criminal justice, under- representation in
Congress, and many other areas of the economy and society.
The mass murders of Indigenous Native nations and the
enslavement of African people carried out by the government on
behalf of the expansion of the U.S. capitalist market are two
vivid examples of institutionalized racism. Today, Latino,
Arab, Native and Asian peoples are also victims of a U.S.
policy of poverty, intense repression, marginalization and
super-exploitation.
In the case of people of African descent, there has been an
ongoing struggle for racial equality since the end of the Civil
War almost 140 years ago. The revolutionary period known as
Reconstruction was an attempt by the freed people to win
complete equality with whites.
That period ended tragically and abruptly in 1877 with the
"Great Compromise," when federal troops were ordered by
governmental decree to withdraw from the South, abandoning the
freed slaves and rendering them defenseless in a semi-enslaved
existence that included sharecropping.
This betrayal ushered in an era of counter-revolution.
Southern Black people suffered unmitigated terror at the hands
of ultra-racist, fascist formations like the KKK and the White
Citizens Council, led by former Confederate officers and slave
masters. Countless thousands of Black people were lynched; none
of their murderers was brought to justice.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court--dominated by Southern and
Northern racist judges--ruled that the policy of "separate but
equal" was constitutional, thus giving legal sanction to Jim
Crow segregation.
After World War I, millions of Black people migrated to the
North to escape economic and physical repression. They hoped to
find equal opportunities there.
What they found was a different kind of racism: segregated
housing, police brutality and low-paying jobs. Many labor
unions collaborated with the bosses in denying Black workers
training in better-paid, more skilled jobs. Anti-racist
solidarity with Black workers by union leaders remained
elusive.
When white workers went on strike, bosses often deliberately
hired Black workers, who ordinarily couldn't get the jobs, to
cross the picket lines. They hoped to inflame racial
antagonisms and defeat the unions. For the Black workers, as
for many immigrant workers today, they had no choice. It was
either work or starve.
Only a vigorous organizing effort by the unions to
incorporate workers of color and a campaign of anti-racist
solidarity can protect all workers' jobs. But instead,
conservative union officials like George Meany, the late
president of the AFL-CIO, resisted opening up apprenticeship
programs to Black workers as well as other workers of color and
women.
Rebellions push open some doors
The massive Civil Rights struggles in the South and
righteous rebellions of Black people against poverty and
unemployment in the Northern ghettoes, especially in 1965 in
the Watts section of Los Angeles, forced the U.S. government to
give more than just lip service to the idea of affirmative
action.
Affirmative action in jobs had first been considered within
the Eisenhower administration in 1953. Various commissions and
agencies were later established under the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations. Yet none of them instituted any program to
redress the systematic exclusion of Black workers by racist
employers.
Three years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,
African Americans composed just 8 percent of union con struc
tion workers. The electrical, asbestos, plumbing and elevator
trades had an abom inable number of only 1, 400 Black members
out of 330,000 total. (Equal Em ploy ment Opportunity News,
Sept. 28, 1969)
It was during Richard Nixon's presidency that racial quotas
were first used as a concrete remedy on the federal level to
address racist hiring practices. Assistant Labor Secretary for
Wages and Standards Arthur A. Fletcher, who was Black, rewrote
the Philadelphia Plan in June 1969. It required contractors in
projects that received more than $50,000 in federal assistance
to hire Black and other workers of color "in good faith."
The Office of Federal Contract Com pli ance, in consultation
with Phila del phia contractors, was authorized to establish
numerical ranges for hiring African Americans. For instance,
they were to hire 5 to 9 percent Black iron workers, with
additional increases each year after 1970.
Nixon, a right-wing, law-and-order, pro-war president,
flip-flopped on the issue of affirmative action. Certainly the
thought of another rebellion caused the government great
consternation. Some believe Nixon also used the issue to try to
win over Black voters.
During this same period, students of color carried out
heroic struggles on campuses, including sit-ins and strikes.
These battles won open admissions, Black and Latino Studies,
and full scholarships for students who had faced doors shut
tight because they were either poor or not white.
Erosion of affirmative action
Since the Bakke decision, there has been slow erosion of
affirmative-action programs for people of color.
In 1996, the University of Texas admissions program was
temporarily dismantled by a U.S. federal appeals court. As a
result, the percentage of Black first-year students dropped
from a range of 4.1 to 5.6 percent before the decision, down to
2.7 percent.
Affirmative action with quotas seems to become controversial
only when racist whites scream "reverse discrimination." It's a
false argument when you look at the sordid record of racist
oppression in the United States. The place where "racial
quotas" play the biggest role is in the prison population and
on death row.
By the end of the 20th century, close to one-third more
young Black men were in prison than in college, according to
the Institute of Justice Policy. State spending for prison
construction was six times higher than state spending for
higher education.
Racism and capitalism
go hand in hand
A recent New York Times poll showed that more than half the
U.S. population supports affirmative action. The truth is that
affirmative action is just one small remedy in what should be
an overall effort to overcome the centuries-old legacy of
slavery and white-supremacist ideology.
Workers World spoke to Larry Holmes about the current
assault on affirmative action. In 1978 Holmes was co-founder of
a national coalition to overturn the Bakke decision and an
organizer of a national demonstration in Washington, D.C., that
drew 35,000--predominantly Black youths --to protest the Bakke
ruling. He is also author of the pamphlet "Weber Was Wrong; the
Steelworkers Were Right: A Case for Affirmative Action," about
a struggle between the Steel Workers union and a white worker
who charged the union with "reverse discrimination."
Holmes told WW: "What is happening at U-M is another round
in the battle that oppressed people have waged to win a measure
of progress. But that struggle has far greater potential today
because people are mad as hell about Trent Lott's racism, about
the threat of war against Iraq, about skyrocketing unemployment
and poverty and the whole capitalist system. And all of this
anger will be brought to bear against those who want to roll
back affirmative action."
Capitalism is the root cause of racism today because this
profits-first system is based on divide and conquer, not unity
and solidarity.
It is because of capitalism that, in this wealthy country,
there are not enough good schools for all students who apply.
Racism is to the advantage of the bosses, because it makes it
easier for them to keep a huge section of the workers
super-exploited in low-paying jobs.
Everyone should have the right to a decent job and
education, regardless of their nationality, sex, gender, sexual
preference, age and abilities. These rights, now matter how
much is won, will always be at risk under capitalism.
The struggle for equality and justice can only be fully
achieved under socialism. It requires the kind of social
education and solidarity that come with an economic system that
replaces big-business ownership and its drive for profits with
social ownership and the planning of production to meet human
needs.
Reprinted from the Feb. 6, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
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