Affirmative Action and Racial Justice: Requiem, Reaffirmation and Struggle

Summary

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Thus, it is actually argued in some quarters that too much is at stake to insist on justice sought, consistency pledged and change promised, and that we must sacrifice even things we once held sacred and central to our selfunderstanding and self-assertion as a moral and social vanguard in this country and the world. Indeed, it is argued we must avoid at all cost upsetting and unnerving White folks who would, practicing a reason-resistant racial protocol, judge us as arrogant, aggressive, unworthy and unwilling to face the facts and current balance offerees in this country. But this is a sign of how shaky and shallow the established order's self-congratulatory claim of racial maturity and the end of racism is, when we find ourselves boppin', bending' and bein' busy placating and pleasing people who allegedly have transcended the racial antipathy and moral immaturity that racism generates and justifies at the same time.

So, a serious discussion of Bakke and affirmative action is not advisable, not because it's not of historical and current relevance, but because in many places it is reasoned it would be counterproductive and we must wait for an imagined miracle to emerge in November without a struggle to produce it. Here Frederick Douglass' lecture on struggle, Martin King's letter from the Binningham jail and Malcolm's lecture on history, especially his distinction between being responsible and respectable in the eyes of your people and those of the oppressor, seem appropriate. And thus, the discussion and struggle should proceed.

[...] the established order's silence is first reflective of its traditional resistance to critical self-assessment and serious social change. seeking cheap and quick solutions for a high-cost and long-standing problem, it harbors the hardly concealed hope that-just nominating and running a Black presidential candidate, let alone electing one, will end arguments about the lack of access and opportunity for Blacks and other people of color in this country and therefore remove the need for real remedies and the struggle required to achieve them.

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Extract

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Affirmative Action and Racial Justice: Requiem, Reaffirmation and Struggle

E is clearly no accident or unintentional oversight that here has been no major marking or significant discusion, and in most cases not even minor mention, of the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court Bakke Decision (1978) which saved affirmative action, though in modified form, leaving U.S. society some measure of public claim to be still de...

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