My Constitutional Law Professor, Victor Goode, has authored an excellent piece on the upcoming affirmation action case:
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, a case many court watchers believe will lead to the functional end of affirmative action in higher education. That it is before the Court at all—an extraordinarily short nine years after the justices’ last ruling, which already shaped deeply admissions’ policies—is a testament to the conservative legal campaign against affirmative action.
The arguments of the plaintiff, a white UT-Austin applicant named Abigail Fisher who was denied admission, echo the bizarrely simplistic notion articulated by Chief Justice John Roberts. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts has famously declared. Of course, what he really means is to ignore history, turn a blind eye to all the social science data on widespread inequity today and pretend that we live in a colorblind world. But Roberts leads a court that observers believe will agree with him on affirmative action, at least.
In order to understand how we got to this legal crossroads, it is important to look back to the cases that preceded Fisher.
In June of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gave a speech at Howard University where he outlined the purpose of affirmative action as a government policy. In that famous address he declared,
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. When that speech was delivered, African Americans had endured 246 years of chattel slavery and 90 years of racial subordination under Jim Crow laws, but only nine years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education declared that segregation was unlawful. Johnson, a southerner, had lived out segregation. But by the time he had ascended to the presidency, his views on race had changed. In the 1965 speech, he went on to say, “This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” This last line, with it’s focus on results, became the cornerstone for affirmative action.
Johnson understood that America had an obligation to help repair the untold damage that had been done by institutional racism. While government programs alone could never accomplish this, he understood government had a key role to play. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed under his administration and additional civil rights bills would soon follow. But affirmative steps beyond these laws were needed to undo the effects of over 300 years of racial oppression. Affirmative action, particularly in our colleges and universities became one among several initiatives to move the country in this new direction.
Read the full piece at Colorlines.
Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women.
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