1 janv. 1978 - regents of the University of Cali v. bakke limits affirmative action

Description:

affirmative action:Policies established in the 1960s and 1970s by governments, businesses, universities, and other institutions to address past discrimination against specific groups such as people of color and white women.
regents of the university of california v. bakke: The 1978 Supreme Court ruling that limited affirmative action by rejecting a quota system.


After a decade of churning social and political unrest — the Vietnam War, protests, riots, Watergate, recession — many Americans were exhausted with politics and cynical by the mid-1970s. But while some retreated from activism, others took reform in new directions. Civil rights efforts continued, the women’s movement achieved major gains, and gay rights blossomed. These movements pushed the “rights revolution” of the 1960s deeper into American life. In response, social conservatives pushed back, forming their own organizations to combat the emergence of what they saw as an excessively permissive society.


The 1964 Civil Rights Act required that employers hire without regard to “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” But many liberals thought “nondiscrimination” was not enough, after centuries of slavery and decades of segregation, to allow African Americans and other people of color access to the economic mainstream. They believed that government, universities, and private employers needed to take positive steps to welcome a wider, more diverse range of Americans. That meant more people of color, more women of all backgrounds, and more people from a wide range of underrepresented groups.


This outlook gave rise to the idea of affirmative action — procedures designed to address the legacy of historical exclusion rather than simply guarantee fairness in the present. First advanced by the Kennedy administration in 1961, affirmative action received a boost under President Lyndon Johnson, whose Labor Department fashioned plans to encourage government contractors to recruit underrepresented racial groups. Women were added under the last of these plans, when pressure from the women’s movement highlighted the problem of gender discrimination. By the early 1970s, affirmative action had been refined by court rulings into a set of legally acceptable procedures: hiring and enrollment goals, special recruitment and training programs, and set-asides (specially reserved slots) for both underrepresented racial groups and women.

Affirmative action, however, displeased many whites, who felt the deck was now stacked against them. Much of the dissent came from conservative groups that had opposed civil rights all along. They charged affirmative action advocates with “reverse discrimination.” Legal challenges abounded from white employees, job seekers, and university applicants. Some liberal groups sought a middle position. In a widely publicized 1972 letter, Jewish organizations, seared by the memory of quotas that once kept Jewish students out of elite colleges, came out against all racial quotas but nonetheless endorsed “rectifying the imbalances resulting from past discrimination.”


Americans grew even more divided over the policy of affirmative action in the 1970s. For many people, such as African Americans and Latinos, affirmative action promised that groups who faced historical discrimination would have equal opportunity in jobs and education. For many whites, affirmative action looked like “reverse discrimination,” and they fought its implementation. Here, supporters of affirmative action encourage the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the California Bakke decision, declaring racial quotas unconstitutional. In the end, however, the Supreme Court upheld Bakke, and the scope of affirmative action narrowed.


A major shift in affirmative action policy came in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the University of California at Davis Medical School for rejecting him in favor of less-qualified minority-group candidates. Headlines across the country sparked anti–affirmative action protest marches on college campuses and vigorous discussion on television and radio as well as in the White House. Ultimately, the Supreme Court struck down the medical school’s quota system, which set aside 16 of 100 places for “disadvantaged” students. The Court ordered Bakke admitted but indicated that a more flexible affirmative action plan, in which race could be considered along with other factors, would pass constitutional muster. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke thus both upheld affirmative action but, in rejecting quotas, limited its force. More court rulings and state referenda over the following decades would further hem in affirmative action. California voters were the most aggressive, approving Proposition 209 in 1996, which prohibited public institutions — schools, universities, and government agencies — from using affirmative action to increase diversity in employment and education. Though some states followed California’s lead in banning it altogether, today affirmative action is widely practiced in both public and private institutions across the country, but quotas are illegal and identities such as race and gender must be weighed alongside other factors in qualifications for admission or employment.

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