Convenient amnesia was an important byproduct of the now dominant view of how to overcome the effects of two hundred years of slavery and one hundred years of legally sanctioned discrimination against African Americans and anyone not "white". Post World War II people like my family benefited from the "GI Bill" - the comprehensive set of federal benefits that built the suburbs. Free public colleges, stipends, and government insured VA mortgages for the full purchase price of a newly built single family home. For whites only due to a Federal Housing Administration requirement of racially harmonious communities. Orlando Patterson aptly labels that "white affirmative action". I was a beneficiary of that program, growing up on Long Island in the archetypal post-war 100% white suburb of Levittown, New York.
The United States Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that separate was not equal. It's directive to dismantle segregation "with all deliberate speed" was met with massive resistance across the south. Conservative Democrats like Georgia federal appeals judge Griffin Bell opposed "affirmative action", arguing that it was, like prohibition, doomed to fail in the face of cultural resistance. The Supreme Court. bolstered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, briefly embraced affirmative action, demanding in Green v,. New Kent County (1968) that the dual school system and its effects be eliminated "root and branch". School busing and other remedies were endorsed by the Supreme Court in Charlotte, N.C. in 1971, when the majority managed to enlist Nixon's Chief Justice Warren Burger.
But that was the high point. White cultural resistance in the suburbs of Detroit and the City of Boston were fatal to public school integration plans in the "de facto" "voluntarily segregated" northern schools. Courts could not demand affirmative action if it crossed local school district lines, said Chief Justice Warren Burger in Milliken v. Bradley the 1974 decision voiding a desegregation order encompassing metropolitan Detroit. So-called "white flight" was treated as a voluntary cultural phenomenon (viz. soon to be President Jimmy Carter's Attorney General Griffin Bell) beyond the reach of the courts and of the equal protection principles of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Since then affirmative action has hung on by a thread, abjured as a remedy - except for formal legal segregation - a narrow slot remained. It was carved by the concurring opinion of former railroad lawyer Lewis Powell in Bakke v. Board of Regents. (1977) "Diversity", he wrote, was a legitimate objective in higher education. That thin reed is all that has survived the scrutiny of a Supreme Court which repudiates compensation for centuries of slavery and legal apartheid and "white affirmative action". Even voluntary efforts to achieve integration were repudiated by Chief Justice Roberts for a plurality in Parents Concerned v. Seattle. The way to stop discrimination by race is to stop discriminating by race, he wrote in a maxim sure to appear in his obituary along with the balls and strikes metaphor that helped him win confirmation by the Senate.
I'll let Melvin Urofsky and his brilliant reviewer Orlando Patterson take it from here. - GWC
Affirmative Action: The Uniquely American Experiment - The New York Times
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