MOVING TOWARD A GENUINELY COLOR-BLIND SOCIETY
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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The U.S. Supreme Court held in June that race-conscious
affirmative action admission programs at Harvard University and the
University of North Carolina violate the Constitution’s guarantee of
equal protection.
The decision,
written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, declared that, “The student
must be treated based on his or her experience as an individual—-not on
the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the
opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded wrongly, that the
touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills
built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. Our
constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Roberts noted that the rules called for by the Court’s
decision are already the norm in the majority of American universities:
“Three out of every five American universities do not consider race in
their admissions decisions. And several states, including some of the
most populous (California, Florida and Michigan) have prohibited
race-based admissions outright.”
Beyond
this, Roberts wrote that, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed
as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion
of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, or
otherwise.”
As a member of President
Ronald Reagan’s transition team at the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) in 1980-81, which was headed by my good friend and
long-time colleague, J.A. Parker, one of the earliest black
conservatives, I believe that the Supreme Court has moved us in the
direction of a genuinely color-blind society. This is what the civil
rights movement always endorsed. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
declared that men and women should be judged on the “content of their
character,” not “the color of their skin.”
If
minority students are lagging behind academically, we must improve the
quality of the elementary and high school education they receive, not
lower the academic standards of our colleges and universities. In our
report about the future of the EEOC, our transition team, which included
Clarence Thomas, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court,
advocated an end to race-based programs. The goal of a genuinely
color-blind society is what civil rights leaders such as Thurgood
Marshall, always advocated. Now, let us hope that our society will move
in this direction.
What
is not well known to many Americans is that there has always been a
significant group of respected black opponents to race-based affirmative
action programs. Clarence L. Pendleton, Jr., for example, was chairman
of the Civil Rights Commission under President Reagan. He called
affirmative action “divisive, unpopular and immoral,” and opposed
federal set-aside contracts for minority-owned businesses. He argued
that all Americans, white and black, must succeed on the merits of their
own abilities, without any special preference. It was, he believed,
the height of racism to think that an individual’s political philosophy
should be based on the color of his skin rather than his study of
history, his concept of right and wrong and his notion of what
constituted a just society.
Legalized
quotas on the job market, Pendleton argued, form a crutch on which
minorities must not lean. “Would Hank Aaron be the home run king if
they had moved the fences in 10 feet every time he came to bat? Would
Walter Payton have all those 100-yard games if they changed the rules
when he carried the ball?…I don’t want my progress demeaned any more.
Let me be free…free to achieve.”
In
1978, my old friend Anne Wortham, a leading black academic at Illinois
State University, wrote an important article in The Freeman discussing a
Supreme Court decision at that time upholding the California Supreme
Court ruling that Allan P.Bakke, who was white, should be admitted to
medical school at the University of California, Davis, on the basis that
ethnic and racial quotas are unconstitutional according to the 14th
Amendment.
Wortham,
author of the widely praised book “The Other Side of Racism,” noted
that, “It seems that the Justices hold the widespread opinion that one
is demeaned or insulted only when he is discriminated against because of
race; but there are those of us who are insulted, if not demeaned,
when we are discriminated in favor of because of race or other equally
irrelevant classifications. As a member of both the racial and gender
groups so favored, I reject the opinion that preferential treatment of
racial minorities should be allowed if it serves a social good. There
is nothing humanitarian in a policy that uses racial classifications to
‘further a compelling government purpose,’ as the Justices put it. Any
government purpose which must be served in such a manner may be suspect
as having sinister motives.”
In
the view of black economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University, “What affirmative action has done is destroy the
legitimacy of what had already been achieved , by making all black
achievements look like questionable accomplishments, or even outright
gifts .”
Anne Wortham
recalls seeing her father work long hours, sacrificing to provide for
the education of his children, determined “that he would do so despite
Jim Crow and without outside assistance. I hear this self-educated man
telling us that our education was his investment in the future…The
society he was preparing me for was one in which merit was the basis of
achievement. It was also one in which racial discrimination was
prevalent. But in addressing this issue, black fathers like mine taught
their children a rule of thumb taken from the words of Booker T.
Washington: ‘Any individual who learns to do something better than
anybody else—-learns to do a common thing in an uncommon manner—-has
solved his problem, regardless of the color of his skin.’”
Some
years ago, the widely read black journalist Juan Williams wrote a book
entitled, “Enough” with the subtitle, “The Phony Leaders, Dead-End
Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black
America—-And What We Can Do About It.” Those who proclaim themselves
leaders in the black community, Williams argues, refuse to articulate
established truths about what it takes to get ahead: strong families,
education and hard work.
Williams
declares: “Where is strong black leadership to speak hard truth to
those looking for direction…the strong focus on self-determination has
faded, at a moment when its impact could have been the most powerful.
In its place is a tired rant by civil rights leaders about the power of
white people—-what white people have done wrong, what white people
didn’t do, and what white people should do. This rant puts black people
in the role of hapless victims waiting for only one thing—-white guilt
to bail them out. The roots of this blacks-as-beggars approach from
black leaders are planted in an old debate that is now too often
distorted.”
The most
prominent voice for black liberation after the Civil War, Williams
points out, belonged to Frederick Douglass, a former slave who secretly
taught himself to read, then became a skilled worker in Baltimore’s
shipyards before escaping to freedom in the North: “It was Douglass who
first called on black people to do for themselves when he wrote an
editorial titled ‘Learn Trades or Starve.’ By the end of the 19th
century, as the government’s many promises to help former slaves turned
out to be mostly empty words, a new black leader emerged. Booker T.
Washington picked up on Douglass’ legacy by proposing defiant black
self-determination as the best strategy for black advancement…His idea
was that nlack people should capitalize on the skills and knowledge they
had gained as slaves. People who had worked the land for others now
had the chance to own that land and take the profits of their work for
themselves.”
Black
success in the future, Williams argues, does not lie in government
race-based programs but, he states, in young people finishing high
school and college, taking a job and holding it, marrying after
finishing school and while holding a job and having children only after
you are 21 and married.
The
Institute for American Values issued a report showing that in the past
50 years, after segregation came to an end, “the percentage of black
families headed by married couples declined from 78 per cent to 34 per
cent.” In the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, , households headed by black
women who never married jumped from 3.8 per thousand to 69.7 per
thousand. In 1940, 75 per cent of black children lived with both
parents. By 1990 only 33 percent of black children lived with a mother
or father.
The path to a
better life is to be found not in race-based affirmative action
programs which, as the Supreme Court declared, violate the our
Constitutional rights, but in the lessons learned by such thoughtful
black Americans as J.A. Parker, Clarence Pendleton, Thomas Sowell, Anne
Wortham, Juan Williams and so many more. Martin Luther King’s goal of a
genuinely color-blind society is one toward which Americans of all races
should work.
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