Tag Archives: Affirmative Action and Race

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Busing Forever? Resegregation Now?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Hearing its most important school-desegregation case in more than a decade, the Supreme Court was presented last week with two unappealing prospects: court-ordered busing in perpetuity or (de facto) resegregation.

The Court can and should avoid both alternatives.

The immediate issue in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell is whether the school board acted lawfully in 1985 when it ended, for students from the first grade through the fourth grade, the cross-town busing that a federal judge had ordered in 1972 as a remedy for decades of official school segregation.

The larger issue is whether the court ordered desegregation measures that bind hundreds of cities all over the country can ever be discontinued if the result would be neighborhood schools that reflect racial imbalances.

While the oral arguments at the Court on Oct. 2 focused on legalisms like the definition of a "unitary" school system and such mysteries of causation as whether today’s segregated housing patterns are a vestige of official segregation, the larger questions at stake remained in the background.

Does the educational and social value of integration to blacks and whites alike outweigh the strain on small children who are bused to schools in alien surroundings far from their homes? Does it outweigh the problems caused by white flight, which has left many big cities with racially isolated majorities of black and Hispanic students, while sapping public support for the schools?

How much of the white flight was in fact caused by forced busing? Are whites who flee busing racist or irrational, or do some have reason to worry that their children’s education will suffer?

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Fending Off ‘Fighting Words’

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

When Sen. Jesse Helms last year proposed restrictions on government support for offensive speech, liberals quickly branded him a Neanderthal right-wing censor.

But what about those liberals with censorial tendencies of their own? Are they Neanderthals, too-or some other, more sensitive, species?

It was Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, who pushed through the Senate last summer a ban on use of federal arts money for "material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin." (His more widely publicized provision would have cut off money for "obscene or indecent" materials.)

The president of the University of Pennsylvania denounced the Helms proposal as an effort "to cleanse public discourse of offensive material."

But in strikingly similar language, his own university forbids as harassment "any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes individuals on the basis of race, ethnic or national origin … and that… creates an … offensive academic, living or work environment."

The urge to censor campus speech is prompted by dozens of ugly racist incidents that have fouled campuses around the nation. These have included the posting of racist epithets, jokes, and caricatures on signs and bulletin boards, and shameful physical and verbal attacks on minority students and homosexuals.

Vandalism and physical assaults or threats can of course be punished without free-speech qualms. But even purely verbal attacks can also inflict great trauma, especially on minority group members who feel isolated, conspicuous, and unwelcome on overwhelmingly white campuses.

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Second Class Citizens

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

"THE CITY ATTORNEY LOOKED AT ME," SUSAN REEVES recalls, "and he said, ‘Little lady’-even though I’m five feet eight inches tall, he called me little lady- ‘blacks congenitally do not like to fight fires.’ "

The year was 1975. The place was Birmingham. And Reeves could sense that settling her class action suit to bring more blacks into the lily-white fire department and other city agencies was not going to be easy.

It got easier in time, through a combination of tough litigating and black power at the ballot box. Reeves, who was Birmingham counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, her colleague Stephen Spitz, and her former colleagues at the Justice Department won one round in the case and started another. After Richard Arrington, Jr., became Birmingham’s first black mayor in 1979, the case moved toward settlement.

Finally-or not so finally, as it turned out-in a May 1981 consent decree the city, the black plaintiffs, and the Justice Department agreed on a sweeping citywide affirmative action plan that forced rapid hiring and promoting of blacks in city government.

Since 1981 this consent decree has become the focus of a legal and ideological war that produced a major Supreme Court decision this June, allowing white fire fighters to go forward with a challenge to the decree’ preferences for blacks in promotion.

That war was intensified by a bitter brawl between the Reaganized Justice Department, which switched sides and sought to eviscerate an affirmative action consent decree it had signed in 1981, and a pro bono team from New York’s Cravath, Swaine & Moore headed by partner Robert Joffe.

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Give This Man A(nother) Job

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In the eyes of conservatives, William Lucas is a fine choice for the nation’s top civil-rights enforcement job because he seems to oppose affirmative-action plans that allocate jobs on the basis of race. And, oh yes, because of his race.

President George Bush’s candidate to be assistant attorney general for civil rights may not like racial quotas, but his nomination is a racial quota.

In the colorblind legal and political world for which conservatives purport to pine, it would be inconceivable for any president to choose a man as innocent of the law as Lucas for this crucial litigating position.

In the world we live in, there is much to be said for the symbolism of filling the top civil-rights job with a black man who has worked hard to overcome adversity and has made his life an inspiring success story. But there are people who fit that description who know something about civil-rights law. Lucas is not one of them. To put him in charge of civil-rights enforcement is to reduce the post to empty symbolism, to fail to take it seriously.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a liberal on civil-rights issues who supports Lucas, articulated the nominee’s one qualification most clearly: "Bill Lucas’ major asset for this position is his 61 years of tough experience as a member of a minority."

Similar arguments have been made for preferential hiring of blacks as inner-city police officers and schoolteachers. But they have met with little sympathy from the conservatives who now back Lucas.

A Civil Rights Division chief who did not understand the law would be a pawn moved about on a chessboard by others. This is no job for a figurehead. It is a hands-on litigating post in which detailed knowledge of the law is the essence of policy-making. That law can be learned, but Lucas has displayed no capacity for learning it.

Woeful Ignorance

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Now the Court Has Gone Too Far

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

The Supreme Court’s three major, 5-4 discrimination rulings this month seem to reflect an unarticulated notion that the most serious problems of civil-rights law facing America today are the legal harassment of employers and the oppression of white males.

Justice Byron White’s choice of words in his June 5 opinion for the 5-4 majority in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio was suggestive. While blandly acknowledging the "unfortunate" problem of discrimination against non- whites in our society, he lamented the "host of evils" caused by legal rules that spur employers to adopt quota systems and discriminate in favor of minorities.

Our legal and political systems have, in fact, spawned enough "reverse discrimination" and enough groundless discrimination suits by minorities and women against innocent employers to justify some concern and perhaps some corrective action on the Court’s part. The refusal of many liberals to acknowledge that these problems exist helps explain the shrillness of their attacks on the Court’s good faith.

In this sense, the Court’s new conservative majority may have been seeking to move the law in a healthy direction. But they have moved it way too far.

Legal rules are such crude instruments for affecting human conduct that those aimed at foreclosing the possibility of reverse discrimination will, inevitably, also have the effect of denying redress to many victims of the more pervasive discrimination that still confronts minorities and women.

In groping for the right balance, the new majority seems to proceed from a skewed perspective: that discrimination against white males has become a problem of the same magnitude as the discrimination, present and past, that has denied to millions of blacks any real opportunity to participate fully in American life.