Looking Back at an Ugly Time
By BOB HERBERT - NYT, February 2003 - original
Sometimes it helps to take a look back and see just how far we've come.
In a response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the nation's public schools desegregated, William F. Buckley Jr.'s guidebook to conservative thought, National Review, declared the following in the summer of 1957:
"The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. . . .
"National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. . . . Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom."
In those days blacks were frozen out of the mainstream of American life, routinely turned (or shoved) away not just from public schools, but from hotels, restaurants and movie theaters, from department stores and soda fountains, from most trades and professions, from polling booths and hospitals, from even the semblance of a shot at equal opportunity.
To be black was to be condemned to an environment of perpetual humiliation. My father swallowed his journalistic aspirations and lived out his life as an upholsterer. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., cruelly harassed to the very end, was widely derided as "Martin Luther Coon." That was not so long ago. So in some sense it's remarkable that by the end of the 20th century so many battles against racism had been won and a broad national consensus in favor of a more tolerant, more inclusive society had been reached.
The task now, in the 21st century, is to build on those victories and that consensus. Which brings us to affirmative action.
A glance at the current challenges to affirmative action in higher education would show little more than the fact that a number of white applicants have asserted in court that they were illegally denied admission to college or law school because of preferences given to racial or ethnic minorities.
That is their right and they have the support of many principled people.
A closer look at these challenges, however, would show that they are largely being driven by a huge, complex and extraordinarily well-financed web of conservative and right-wing organizations that in many cases are hostile not just to affirmative action but to the very idea of a multiracial, pluralistic America.
A new book published by the Institute for Democracy Studies in New York — "The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice," by Lee Cokorinos — documents in exceptional detail this nationwide effort to roll back a proud half-century of progress toward social justice and a more inclusive society.
The driving force behind the Michigan University cases, for example, is the Center for Individual Rights, a right-wing outfit that in its early years, as Mr. Cokorinos noted, received financial support from the Pioneer Fund, an organization that spent decades pushing the notion that whites are genetically superior to blacks.
We need to see this picture more clearly. There's a reason why so many mainstream individuals and groups, and some of the nation's largest corporations, have filed briefs with the Supreme Court in support of Michigan's effort to save its affirmative-action programs. The United States is a better place after a half-century of racial progress and improved educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities, and women.
We have all benefited, and voluntary efforts to continue that progress, including the policies at Michigan, are in the interest of us all. Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the controlling opinion in the Bakke case in 1978, eloquently addressed the matter of campus diversity when he said that "a robust exchange of ideas" is of "transcendent value to us all."
An unchallenged right-wing war against the very idea of diversity will turn us back in the direction of the noxious beliefs spewed out by National Review in 1957.