That turns out to be a difficult question to answer. As late as 1969, less than five per cent of all professors had African or Asian ancestry, and around eighty per cent were men. Harvard won at the trial level because the judge ruled that its admissions program is consistent with other Supreme Court decisions, such as Bakke. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. At Harvard, twenty-seven per cent of tenured faculty are women, and eight per cent are underrepresented minorities. Of the people who like racial diversity but don’t like affirmative action in the preferential sense, there are two types. The marketplace matters because the biggest defenders of affirmative action are not the N.A.A.C.P. Obviously, just by the nature of the policy, some significant number of whites and males who would have been admitted or hired before affirmative-action programs were in place were not. They chatted, and Johnson asked him to come by his office. And they did. And it is possible to understand the opposition of black conservatives, like Clarence Thomas, who see it as patronizing to African-Americans. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy delivered the opinion for the 7-1 majority. The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action A case in which the Court held that the judiciary did not have standing to overturn the state constitutional amendment regarding affirmative action in … Oyez About Four of the justices contended that any racial quota system supported by government violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. People take a civic pride in having a racially diverse workplace or educational institution. According to Nicholas Lemann’s history of meritocracy, “The Big Test,” the man who suggested it was an African-American lawyer named Hobart Taylor, Jr. Affirmative action has expanded to cover many kinds of difference, and, since Bakke, to be thought of as in service to a general social commitment to diversity per se—so that now people say things like “What about diversity of ideology?,” as though that somehow presented the same moral demand as a commitment to racial diversity. Once the Court made it clear that every hotel and lunch counter must serve every customer regardless of race, that fear was significantly reduced. Do they really think that white Americans, wherever they work or go to college, do not carry a lifelong advantage because of the color of their skin? It was decided in 1978, and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. This was so contrary to everything that Reagan had been saying about affirmative action that the Labor Department hired an outside consulting firm to vet its own report. As I helped feed these residents, I understood how our common humanity makes us ‘infinitely responsible’ to others. "Will Affirmative Action Eliminate Negative Stereotypes?" The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants and granted the motion to remove Russell as an intervenor. Then we get to Trump, who, Urofsky points out, “is the first Republican since the civil rights revolution to reach the White House without campaigning against affirmative action.” Urofsky doesn’t say so, but one reason Trump ignored the issue is probably that politicians who oppose affirmative action normally do so in the name of color blindness, and Trump is not color-blind. The Court received sixty-nine amicus briefs (a lot) arguing in favor of Michigan’s affirmative-action admissions program, and among the amici were General Motors, Dow Chemical, and Intel, along with the largest federation of unions in the United States, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. (That is still thirty-eight million people, more than the population of Canada.) It is true that probably the main reason Nixon promoted affirmative-action programs was to pit African-Americans against labor, both traditionally Democratic voting bases. Powell concluded that, since Davis could reasonably decide that a diverse class provides a better learning environment, considerations of an applicant’s race—as one factor among others—can fall within the exercise of a constitutionally protected right. You see the decades go past as you read, and the special flavor of each Presidency comes back: Kennedy’s uncomfortable recognition that civil rights was a moral issue that transcended his customary political pragmatism, Johnson’s miraculous emergence as the Moses of racial equality, Nixon’s inveterate scheming, Reagan’s bland duplicity, Obama’s undramatic realism. At the time this case was litigated, many contracts led by agencies of the United States federal government contained financial incentives for the prime contractor to employ subcontractors that were owned or controlled by "socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." Do they really believe that there should be no sacrifice to make or price to pay for the systematic damage done to the lives of millions of American citizens and the men and women who are their ancestors? A case in which the Court determined that the University of Texas’ use of race as a consideration in the admissions process did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.