Affirmative action is one of the most effective tools for correcting past discrimination for people of color and positively changing material conditions for historically and currently oppressed groups. Yet nine years after the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upheld the last tenets of affirmative action, it once again faces a lethal threat.
The front for leading the crusade against affirmative action is the case of Abigail Fisher, whose 2008 application to the University of Texas was rejected. She eventually went to and graduated from Louisiana State University. However, the University of Texas was her first choice, and she felt that her application had been unfairly rejected because she is white.
Fisher and her lawyer argue they simply want race to be taken out of the college application process. The University of Texas argues that it highly values diversity and along with most other colleges today, takes this into account when selecting applicants. Providing a “critical mass” of students of color on campus, UT argues, will further enhance the student experience and help challenge cultural stereotypes. It is even more important for the diversity principle to be applied at the most elite colleges and universities of the United States, where there is intense competition for very few seats.
If we were discussing this issue on the mainstream conservative-liberal spectrum, this would be the end of the article. However, both arguments in University of Texas v. Fisher are oversimplified and lack historical or material analysis. Affirmative action is not about Black people seeking vengeance at the expense of white people. Nor is affirmative action about diversifying the color scheme on college campuses. It is about equity. Or rather, it should be.
Out of the success of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s came a growing awareness that achieving full equality for African Americans would have to go beyond merely rescinding the racist legal codes that defined the old apartheid South.
Everyday material conditions for African Americans in housing, employment, and especially in schools and education, horribly lagged behind the rest of the country. Improving these conditions would require giving the African American community priority status in access to government jobs and services.
The demand for affirmative action in higher education became even more urgent after the urban and college uprisings of the late 1960s. The struggles of college students and the African American community were very much tied together; college students joined the struggles against racism, fighting in particular the almost complete lack of Black and other students of color on college campuses.
Even into the late 1960s, there remained a systematic denial to African Americans of access to the most elite schools, in the ‘liberal’ North as well as in the South. Despite the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that formal segregation in education was unconstitutional, schools throughout the United States remained segregated and inherently unequal.
This clear system-wide discrimination, along with the exploitation of oppressed groups in campus jobs and the exclusion of local oppressed neighborhoods from campus access helped to spark the student uprising and takeover of Columbia University’s campus within days of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.
Affirmative action was a concession won from the racist ruling class as a direct result of this massive and militant struggle. This step forward has helped countless people of color gain an increasing foothold in the world of higher education. Yet the capitalist class has always looked for opportunities to take back these gains. As the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s against racism and other forms of oppression ebbed, affirmative action has come under a brutal right-wing assault.
Affirmative action rolled back
The first major blow came in 1978, when in Bakke v. University of California, the Supreme Court barred “racial quotas,” or reserving seats for students of color. The racist argument validated by the court was that quotas were a form of “reverse discrimination.” In 1989, the court ruled in Richmond v. J.A Crosan that states could not use race to determine economic disparities for the sake of affirmative action policies.
Using the bourgeois court system, opponents of affirmative action have been able to chip away at the policy’s true purpose: correcting past and current discrimination by giving equitable access in order to achieve equality. What was allowed instead by the court was a weaker form of affirmative action, known as the “Harvard Plan,” that merely encouraged colleges to consider race as a small, non-decisive factor in college admissions, “narrowly tailored” for promoting diversity on campus but not taking into account any historical or present material factors. This right-wing consensus was confirmed in the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger.
‘Diversity’ over real equality
U.S. colleges, still reeling from the uprisings of the 1960s, were only too happy to go along with the diversity principle. Despite the fact that material conditions for the African American community were worsening in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and achievement gaps are now rapidly widening due to oversized classes, lack of qualified teachers, run-down and dilapidated schools, tightening budgets, and limited resources. But so long as colleges maintain a trickle of students of color on campus, they can pat themselves on the back and absolve themselves of the responsibilities for correcting their past discriminatory policies or having to address the vast material inequities that are now blighting the futures of millions.
The University of Texas also has a material interest in framing the issue solely as one of “diversity” instead of having to face up to its own racist history. The school has a history of violence and intimidation against African Americans stretching back 150 years.
The university was created by the Confederate Texas government at the outset of the Civil War, a project of a government whose purpose was to maintain the brutal chattel slavery of African Americans.
Jim Crow segregation was rigidly enforced while Confederates and former Klansmen were memorialized throughout the campus. Racism was openly touted by the administration.
Even as late as 2012, the failure of the diversity principle was evident when a UT student posted a derogatory cartoon mocking the killing of Trayvon Martin. Yet, so long as UT upholds some level of diversity by maintaining a “critical mass” of students of color and put up a statue of Dr. King (which was defaced in 2003 and 2004), the university can escape any responsibilities for its past wrongs.
Beyond the University of Texas
Sadly, the behavior of the University of Texas is not atypical for college campuses throughout the United States. It is another way to maintain the caste system of privilege that has benefited whites throughout most of U.S. history, which continues to this day. In this respect, a different form of affirmative action has existed for nearly 250 years, one that gives white people systematic advantages in all arenas including schools and access to higher education, at the expense of African Americans who are subject to systematic disadvantages.
This form of bigotry reasserted itself in the last decade. After affirmative action was eliminated at California’s colleges and universities, enrollment by Black and Latino students dropped dramatically. Of course, oppressed communities were blamed and their youth accused of being lazy and unmotivated to learn. None of the bourgeois experts pointed to the savagely unequal material conditions that such communities have been subjected to for centuries.
There seems to be no political or legal movement against the incredibly unfair advantages enjoyed by so-called legacy students, those admitted because family members attended the same institution. Nor to development students, admitted due to their parent’s immense wealth. Such students make up a substantial portion of the population at elite, Ivy League colleges and universities.
Considering the number of legitimate discrimination cases brought by African Americans that have been ignored and denied, that Fisher even has a case, one being heard by the Supreme Court and one that could potentially eliminate affirmative action altogether is abhorrent and outrageously offensive.
Affirmative action has resulted in greater diversity on campuses, which is a beautiful thing. But that is not the only point of the struggle. Affirmative action is a reform meant to enhance the commitment to civil rights and racial equality by changing material conditions for oppressed groups by giving them priority access.
We celebrate reforms because they result from determined peoples’ movements that force concessions from the ruling class and help to ease the burden of exploitation on oppressed classes. However, reforms can be easily rolled back by the ruling class. This is the case with affirmative action.
A revolutionary court system would have instantly shown Fisher and her lawyer the door.
Only under a socialist state, where every person is guaranteed a quality, top-notch education, will achievement gaps finally be eliminated. Affirmative action will still be needed in the first stages of socialism but because every person will have access to a good education as opposed to it being the privilege of the rich, it is much less likely that such a policy would provoke such an intense racist backlash. Once everyone is made the priority, then everybody wins.
