Browsing through the collection of over
70 pro-“diversity” amicus briefs submitted on behalf of the University of
Texas in the Fisher case, I am reminded, as I often am, of how eerily
the current defense of “taking race into account,” i.e., preferential treatment
based on race, resembles the old Southern arguments in defense of segregation.
As I have
pointed
out
on my blog a number
of times,
one of the oddest, saddest things about contemporary liberalism is the degree
to which it stands on the shoulders, and repeats the arguments, of dead
racists. Anyone, for example, who defends racial preferences must reject
Justice John Marshall Harlan’s stirring comment in Plessy that
“our Constitution is colorblind” and agree with the majority’s holding that the
14th Amendment does not require colorblindness and hence that racial
discrimination can in many circumstances be reasonable and hence
constitutional.
Opposing the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative
in 2006 (before he was convicted
and sent to prison for fraud and corruption), Detroit Mayor Kwame
Kilpatrick declared
to applause in a speech to the NAACP, “We will affirm to the world that
affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow and there will
be affirmative action in the state forever.” Kilpatrick unwittingly channeled
George Wallace’s 1963 acceptance
speech as Governor of Alabama: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the
gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say . . . segregation today . . .
segregation tomorrow . . .segregation forever!”
One of the most famous documents in the
South’s massive resistance to school integration was the “Southern
Manifesto” of 1956, signed by 19 Senators and 77 Representatives, defending
states’ rights and criticizing the Supreme Court for overturning settled law.
To demonstrate how closely its arguments resemble current defenses of
preferential admissions I once posted a version of
that document substituting “diversity” or “racial preferences” for
“segregation.” It is an uncanny fit. The Southerners argued, for example, that
“the ‘separate but equal’ principle [substitute: the amount of diversity and
the means of achieving it] is within the discretion of the state in
regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the Fourteenth
Amendment.”
The Jackson Clarion Ledger quoted a spokesman for the Mississippi
Attorney General’s office explaining that representatives from that state had
“signed on … in the interest of fighting to allow our universities to set their
own admission policies without unnecessary interference or second-guessing by
federal courts.” In a closely related legal document Mississippi joined
several other states in asserting that “states must have the freedom and
flexibility to create strong institutions tailored to the needs of each
particular State and its citizens” and urging the Court “to reject petitioner’s
invitation to … destabilize the careful judgments that each State has made in
light of the conditions and needs facing its own particular institutions of
higher learning.”
The petitioner referred to above is actually
Abigail Fisher, and the attorney general’s spokesman is actually referring to
the amicus
brief Mississippi joined with New York, North Carolina and several other
states defending the University of Texas’s admitting some applicants and
rejecting others based on their race and ethnicity.
Mississippi, still defending racial
discrimination. The more things change….
