Conghaileach
15th February 2003, 19:14
-------------------------
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 construction workers. The
electrical, asbestos, plumbing and elevator trades had an abominable
number of only 1, 400 Black members out of 330,000 total. (Equal Employment 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)
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 construction workers. The
electrical, asbestos, plumbing and elevator trades had an abominable
number of only 1, 400 Black members out of 330,000 total. (Equal Employment 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)