Is Affirmative Action Tomorrow's Civil Rights Guarantee for White America?

By Sherman N. Miller
New Pittsburgh Courier
June 5, 2003

The Black Talented Tenth and the White anti-affirmative action leadership are anxiously awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the University of Michigan case that will either spell life or death for affirmative action in the United States of America's mainstream psyche. But the real question is who will really win when the ruling comes?

Today, many mainstream African Americans owe their admission into the economic mainstream to affirmative action. Hence, affirmative action became a tainted concept in Mainstream America because it became positioned in the modern lexicon as a technique to allow unqualified minorities to gain entrance into high paying mainstream jobs. Prior to affirmative action, racial segregation laws and later a segregationist national psyche were excellent barriers to African American upward mobility. The advent of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and the US Supreme Court's knocking down of the miscegenation laws still left racial progress with much to be desired in Mainstream America.

Proposition 209 in California and the Hopwood case in Texas were ballyhooed as ways of breaking the affirmative action stranglehold on Mainstream American opportunity for minorities. The voters of California said no to special treatment based on race. Texas found that they could no longer exploit preferential treatment in admitting minorities to their public institutions of higher learning. However, both of these states are confronted with the rapid growth of their nonwhite populations. Today this new nonwhite population growth is so big that it now demands that nonwhite people be fully educated in the economic mainstream.

Since this US Supreme Court decision has the potential of being the death knell to affirmative action in America's educational system, US Secretary of Education Rod Brown was asked for his position on the Michigan case. Secretary Brown is the point man on education for the Bush Administration. He advanced the Texas plan where the top ten percent of Texas students graduating from high school are guaranteed admission to Texas colleges and universities. However, some might argue that the Texas plan assumes that inferior racially segregated schools are okay for they will guarantee that minorities get into excellent public universities.

As Secretary Brown spoke, his comments were very chilling because he came across as diametrically opposed to the position of African American members of “The Talented Tenth” to whom affirmative action offered hope. His comments could be very easily written off because they did not fit the popular African American culture. But we must ask, does Secretary Brown's stance really hurt minorities in the long run?

It was difficult to see any positives for African Americans in Secretary Brown's stance until Harvard's Professor Gary Orfeld laid out the case of the new American at the May 2003 Annual Meeting of the Harvard Club in Greenville, DE. Professor Orfeld was arguing a positive case for affirmative action where he shared their efforts on the Michigan Case. What was initially disquieting was this White chap was making the affirmative action case that one might have expected from Secretary Brown or some other prominent African American leader.

Orfeld offered some sobering facts on the tanning of America to the attendees. The chilling came as he spoke of White Americans becoming tomorrow's minority people. Recent immigrants are not Euro centric; today they are coming from places like Mexico, Philippines, India, and so on.

Orfeld ended his presentation pointing out that tomorrow Whites may need affirmative action because they will no longer be the majority people. His closing comment makes you wonder if a US Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action becomes comparable to the 1896 Plessy vs Fergusson ruling that gave America “separate but equal” doctrine that catalyzed the Jim Crow era. Is White America prepared for their grandchildren to feel the impact of an advent of a new era of reverse Jim Crow if Whites become the minority people?

The wildcard in this affirmative action debate is where do America's multiracial population stand? Orfeld admitted that question needed some thought.

Thus, in fifty years, will White America be screaming for another US Supreme Court decision comparable to 1954 Brown Vs Topeka Board of Education that kindled the purported desegregation of America's public schools? What is clear is that affirmative action is not the province of African Americans or other minorities. Affirmative action is underpinned by offering opportunity to whomever that happens to be in the racial or ethnic minority. If we fail to manage today's burgeoning racial and ethnic diverse population, tomorrow portends that the United States of America will see our enchantment with yesteryear's racial and ethnic balkanization evolve into the fissures that destroy the world's last superpower.

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