Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
One of my heroes, Ella Baker, the fearless fighter for civil, human and labor rights, a tireless organizer and founder of Students for Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) once observed: “I think personally, I’ve always felt that the Association (NAACP) got itself hung-up in what I call its legal successes. Having had so many outstanding legal successes, it definitely seemed to have oriented its thinking in the direction that the way to achieve was through the courts.”
Ella Baker is reminding us that the struggle for justice and equality requires “all means necessary” to achieve them.
The former white supremacist president of the United States, Donald Trump, who nearly succeeded in carrying out a fascistic coup d’ etat on January 6, 2021 after he lost the election to Joe Biden, nevertheless, left a more lasting and impactful legacy by packing the Supreme Court with some of the most ideological extreme conservative jurists in recent memory.
The ruling by these majority justices that Affirmative Action, using race as a factor in admission policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina is unconstitutional has buoyed proponent of white privilege. Invoking the 14th Amendment’s equal protection under the law provision is the ultimate in prevarication
“The Supreme Court’s decisions on college admissions are a long-overdue step toward ensuring equal protection under the law. …” said Mitch O’Connell, the current minority Senate leader. As majority leader during the Obama administration he would not allow hearings on President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, holding it back for over a year until the election of Trump. Mission accomplished.
Trump appointed three justices in quick succession; the nominees perjured themselves during the Senate confirmation hearings telling the senators they would uphold established precedents when asked about Roe vs. Wade. “There is no place for discrimination based on race in the United States, and I am pleased that the Supreme Court has put an end to this egregious violation of civil and constitutional rights in admissions processes, which only served to perpetuate racism,” says the feckless former Vice President Mike Pence, agreeing with the ruling. Really? Whose rights are being violated here and what planet does Pence live in when he says there is “no discrimination” based on race? This is the same former vice president who—even after Trump supporters who breached the Capitol wanted to lynch him—failed to vigorously denounce the attempted coup.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., once said in one of his soaring oratories. Africans have not seen this arc bend ever since landing on these shores half a millennium ago. If indeed it bent, it has been in the other direction giving us systematized enslavement, Jim Crow laws, slave patrols—that have morphed into present day police departments with similar missions—cross burning, massacres of Black communities, lynching and the list of crimes goes on and on.
Each Black generation finds itself fighting again and again for rights that it thought their parents had won. The Emancipation Proclamation did not result in all the rights enjoyed by fellow white citizens. It took a century of struggle after that for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts to become law. Segregation was in effect legalized with the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the “separate but equal” legal principle in Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling.
It wasn’t until Thurgood Marshall on behalf of NAACP challenged it and the Warren Court agreed, overturning Plessy. The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954 may have officially desegregated schools but the access to quality education was illusory. One only needs to read Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities” in the public schools in so-called liberal New York City.
Affirmative action that was meant to facilitate access to higher education for Black and Brown applicants to colleges and universities—historically bastions of white privilege—using race as a factor has now been effectively terminated. Universities must explore all options of incorporating income and class-diversity to preclude the possibility of returning to the days of apartheid.
To those politicians who want to preserve white privilege by perversely hiding behind “equal protection under the law” and supporting the SCOTUS’s ruling on Affirmative Action, I submit Justice Kitanji Jackson’s eloquent dissent in the UNC case which unmasks their hypocrisy.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” wrote Justice Jackson. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” Justice Sotomayor made similarly compelling argument in her dissent: “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”
The struggle never ends. A Luta Continua.
