------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 6, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
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 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. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
