Editorial By Brad Cates June 30, 2023
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court stuck down the race based admissions policy of Harvard University. From modest beginnings forty years ago, the idea that society should be divided by race, and individuals judged accordingly, had become the modern segregationist shame of not only most universities, but many corporations as well.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The Rev. M.L. King said. The Harvard decision brings us one step closer to that goal.
America has wrestled with the legacy of race, slavery, and segregation since its founding. While virtually all societies since time immemorial have sanctioned slavery and racial division, America was founded on the premise that all persons are created as individuals , equal before their maker and government institutions . While most Christian and moral people abhorred slavery, the economic reality of the times made elimination seemingly impossible . “Slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. ” Abraham Lincoln said.
In his second Inaugural Address, President Lincoln suggested that the death and destruction wrought by the war was divine retribution for slavery, saying that God may even will that the war continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”, and that the war was the country’s “woe due”.
Not only did the civil war destroy the institution of slavery, but the 14th amendment affirmed in no uncertain terms the equality of all persons before the law.
But perhaps the woe due was the one hundred and fifty years of continued strife to achieve the promise of a color blind society? Even after Brown vs Board of Eduction, elected officials such as Governors George Wallace, Orville Faubus, and Lester Maddox would stand in the doorways of public schools to prevent integration.
President Biden said that the Court’s ruling overturns decades of precedent. Really? What the court really did was ratify a prediction made by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2003. Writing for the 5-4 majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, she wrote ” The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today” .
But as the tail sometimes wags the dog, a very strict and overriding use of race and quotas now permeates almost all universities, and many corporations. Despite nuanced words and outright falsehoods, everyone understands that “diversity” means that potential students and job seekers are quite explicitly conferred , or denied, the equality of our society because of race. This is a zero sum game: some win because of race, some lose because of their race. And the majesty of the 14th amendment is denied to all.
Rather than addressing the root cause of disparity, e.g. the abysmal state of American public school education, many choose to force fit a college solution into the now clearly unconstitutional business of discriminating by race.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in a 2007 ruling . “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” he wrote in 2006.
Until the 1920s, Harvard Medical School set a strict quota cap on the number of Jewish applicants who could be admitted. Even after the Court’s decision last week, Harvard’s ghost of bigotry past rears its ugly head. Harvard’s leadership called for resistance to the Court’s ruling. Being Harvard people who can use clever English, their leadership doesnt call for a strict racist quota, but no one who reads their remarks does not understand that what is meant is to establish policies that discriminate against some races in favor of others. Harvard’s commitment to (diversity) “remains steadfast,” they wrote.
President Eisenhower boldly used his powers to implement the Supreme Court’s Brown decision to integrate our schools. Conversely, President Biden seeks to stand shoulder to shoulder with Maddox, Faubus, and Wallace as he calls for massive resistance to compliance with the Court’s order. After calling it “not a normal court”, he orders the Department of Education to come up with clever ways to circumvent the ruling. What is the diversity they seek? To balance tall people and short people, fat people and skinny ones? No, everyone understands that they very specifically mean to include, or exclude, individuals based upon color.
By popular vote, the people of California and Michigan have banned affirmative action in their constitutions. As a legislator while still in law school nearly 40 years ago, I unsuccessfully introduced a bill to guarantee the rights conferred in the 14th amendment to all New Mexicans.
Yes, equal rights before the law has been a long time coming. Jim Crow laws, Plessy v Ferguson, the Greenwood riot, all were setbacks. It seems we often take two steps forward, and one step back.
Might we be condemned, as Lincoln suggested, that our progress and prosperity be lost as perpetual atonement for our original sin? “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” he pondered.
But this weeks ruling, if enforced, might finally guarantee the rights conferred in the Constitution, and finally grant our nation forgiveness. It is time to move on.