07/18/2023
Great article written by our very own Ward Connerly ❤️
The End of Affirmative Action and the Long Road to Racial Equality Under the Law
After going through slavery, Jim Crow and affirmative action, has the Supreme Court finally brought us there?
By Ward Connerly
June 29, 2023 2:27 pm ET
Are we there yet?
This question, asked by an impatient child throughout a long journey, was also asked by members of the Supreme Court throughout the recent arguments about affirmative action. Well, here we are.
“For too long,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, universities “have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
More than any other people around the globe, America is a values-based society.
Speaking at Gettysburg, Pa., Abraham Lincoln described us as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
It was our values that inspired President John F. Kennedy to usher in affirmative action in 1961. JFK made clear, however, that he held no affection for racial preferences when he said “race has no place in American life or law.”
This quote represented a rejection of Jim Crow but also of the kind of race-based policies that were being suggested to integrate “Negroes” into American society. It was JFK’s position that discrimination based on skin color was the major obstacle to overcome. Accordingly, he embraced a colorblind approach to race integration in America.
I strongly believe that the future of our country demands that we reject our endless pursuit of diversity and equity and claw our way back to our values and the vision embraced by Lincoln and JFK. Ending race-based affirmative action is an important first step in that mission. Over the past 20 years, voters in Arizona, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington backed ballot measures to prohibit racial discrimination—including preferential treatment for minorities. Officials in Idaho, Florida and New Hampshire did the same via legislation or executive order.
As one who was born in Jim Crow as a “colored” person and who has lived through all 62 years of affirmative action, my fear has been that this departure from one of America’s most fundamental values—over which we have fought a civil war—was becoming accepted as the preferred policy, rather than the exception, to our constitutional obligation of equal treatment for every person.
Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of equal rights and against race-based affirmative action in college admissions, it is realistic to anticipate some pushback. Change after 60 years rarely comes easy. For my part, and that of the majority who believe in the ideal that has guided America since its inception, this is a time to rejoice, as America will come closer to living in accordance with its creed.
On the day before the high court’s oral arguments in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, I addressed a rally sponsored by Asian Americans for Equal Education. As I sat chatting with Ed Blum, whose organization was the plaintiff, a college student of Asian descent approached. I asked why she considered this case to be important.
“Because it would give me a chance to prove my merit, and the content of my character,” she said. Martin Luther King Jr. would have nodded even more vigorously than I did.
Mr. Connerly is president of the American Civil Rights Institute.
