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NEWS & LETTERS,
January-February 2003
Black/Red View
Bush's political racism
by John Alan Recently, the Bush administration called upon the
Supreme Court to replace race-based affirmative action in college and university
admissions with a "race neutral'' policy which would admit only the top 10%
of students regardless of their race or ethnic origin. According to President
Bush, this "race neutral" admission would end the quota system that
"unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students." What is ironic about Bush's desire to make affirmative
action "race neutral" is that affirmative action at its beginning was
considered by many whites a form of reverse discrimination, with less qualified
Blacks taking jobs away from them. Many Republican candidates exploited that
misleading concept to win elections, promising to look into affirmative action
abuses. There was never any example of widespread abuses caused
by affirmative action. Nor did affirmative action put an end to racism and
poverty in this country. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FROM BELOW Affirmative action was adopted by the Johnson and Nixon
administrations in response to the urban revolts of the 1960s. Those revolts
made it clear that political freedom was not enough, as long as thousands of
African Americans were unemployed, lived in permanent poverty in the slum areas
of the great cities and were brutalized by police. Thus, Martin Luther King Jr.
called for a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged." Bayard Rustin and
A. Philip Randolph proposed a $100 billion freedom budget to be used over a ten
year period to create jobs and urban development. Those proposals were never realized. However, they did
recognize the limits of political freedom. This means that the struggle against
racism takes various forms, like today making affirmative action "race
neutral." The way the present appropriates history is also shown
in the Trent Lott affair. Senator Trent Lott, at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday
party, boasted that his state voted for Thurmond for president in 1948.
"We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead,
we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." Now, "all these problems'' Lott alluded to is
nothing less than the unfoldment of a new period in African- American mass
action against legalized segregation and racism. Elements of this began to
appear in the 1930s, in the middle of the Depression. Factories were shut down.
More than 12 million people were jobless. Homelessness and poverty was
destroying the lives of untold thousands of people. TRENT LOTT'S BAD OLD DAYS African Americans, North and South, began to challenge
the oppressive post-Reconstruction South loved by Lott and Thurmond. In 1954
legal segregation was abolished by the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Topeka Board
of Education. In 1956, 101 congressmen, including Strom Thurmond, all from
formerly Confederate states, signed the "Southern Manifesto"
denouncing the Brown decision. Meanwhile the Montgomery bus boycott put an end
to segregation on public transportation. Today, 140 years after the Emancipation Proclamation we
still find prominent politicians who think Jefferson Davis is a great person
with a statue to him in Montgomery, Ala. Davis was president of the Confederacy,
and those who want a statue to him are opposed to memorializing the Civil Rights
Movements. The Trent Lott affair made clear that the face of retrogression is not always the same. After all, it was the reactionaries who drove Lott out, not the liberals. We saw Lott apologize many times, even saying on BET that affirmative action has a place. That is when the Right knew they had to get rid of him. The Right would like to appropriate Dr. King but they want to turn his expression "judge not by the color of the skin but by the content of the character" into its opposite. For King it meant an opening of opportunities for African Americans. For Bush it means an end to affirmative action. |
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