Kendall Stanley: Promises unkept
A local historian out here in Arizona, Jack Lassiter, relayed in one of his many talks on the history and culture of this state how the residents of the Tucson area — who spoke nothing but Spanish, interacted with the white settlers moving into the area from the east.
The residents spoke no English, the settlers no Spanish. But they made it work and people eventually spoke both.
As Tucson grew, the city welcomed Chinese, Native Americans, Mormons, black Buffalo Soldiers — you name it, they were all bound up in the diversity of the city.
And, Jack likes to suggest, discrimination wasn’t prevalent, people got along. Why, he wonders, should and could people hate each other?
Which leads me in a roundabout way to the promise of civil rights here in the good ole U.S. of A. and where it stands after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 50 years ago.
“Whitewash: The 50-year campaign to undo the progress of the civil rights movement in the name of colorblindness” is the provocative headline over a story in The New York Times Magazine by Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Hannah-Jones starts with Howard University, where a conservative law group, the Liberty Justice Center, sent a letter to the medical school at the university that it must cease any practice within the university that included a racial component.
Since the supreme court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions many colleges have been told to eliminate racial discrimination in their admissions.
Hannah-Jones writes, “But Howard is no ordinary university. Chartered by the federal government two years after the Civil War, Howard is one of about 100 historically Black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.s. H.B.C.U. is an official government designation for institutions of higher learning founded from the time of slavery through the end of legal apartheid in the 1960s, mostly in the South. H.B.C.U.s were charged with educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants, who for most of this nation’s history were excluded from nearly all of its public and private colleges.
“Though Howard has been open to students of all races since its founding in 1867, nearly all of its students have been Black. And so after the affirmative-action ruling, while elite, predominantly white universities fretted about how to keep their Black enrollments from shrinking, Howard (where I am a professor) and other H.B.C.U.s were planning for a potential influx of students who either could no longer get into these mostly white colleges or no longer wanted to try.
“Wutoh thought it astounding that Howard — a university whose official government designation and mandate, whose entire reason for existing, is to serve a people who had been systematically excluded from higher education — could be threatened with a lawsuit if it did not ignore race when admitting students. “The fact that we have to even think about and consider what does this mean and how do we continue to fulfill our mission and fulfill the reason why we were founded as an institution and still be consistent with the ruling — I have to acknowledge that we have struggled with this,” he told me. “My broader concern is this is a concerted effort, part of an orchestrated plan to roll back many of the advances of the ’50s and ’60s. I am alarmed. It is absolutely regressive.”
Here’s what angers and frustrates me the most:
“These conservative groups — whose names often evoke fairness and freedom and rights — are using civil rights law to claim that the Constitution requires “colorblindness” and that efforts targeted at ameliorating the suffering of descendants of slavery illegally discriminate against white people. They have co-opted both the rhetoric of colorblindness and the legal legacy of Black activism not to advance racial progress, but to stall it. Or worse, reverse it.”
Which takes you back to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, both passed in the ‘60s and both, since their passage, have been subject to backlash.
Aided and abetted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
As the court took aim at ending the practice of the justice department having to watch over the voting in districts where black voters faced obstacles to voting, Chief Justice John Roberts said race relations had come so far that the federal government didn’t need to keep track of and regulate the worst anti-vote offenders. As if …
Little by little, conservatives have worked to chip away at the acts and with the court seemingly in their corner, the promise of the two acts is becoming more and more ephemeral. Death by a thousand decrees.
Yes you have rights, but only to the extent that white society leaves at least some laws intact. The laws are incredibly colorblind, especially if your color just happens to be white.
Progress can only remain progress if we fight for it.
— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Kendall Stanley: Promises unkept
