The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing affirmative action at the University of Michigan but striking down the school’s system of racial quotas led Linda Chavez, in a syndicated column entitled “Supreme Mischief and Racism” (June 26), to warn against desecrating a sacred vision.  Forty years ago this August, “the Rev. Martin Luther King gave a speech that galvanized Americans of all races.”  His invocation of a color-blind society “launched a civil rights revolution that was embraced by the American people and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  As a result America today is a more just society.”  What made King’s message compelling was his hope that “people will not be judged by the color of their skin.”  Therefore, it is “ludicrous” that a majority of the Court would allow the use of race as a “plus factor” for the evaluation of undergraduate candidates at the University of Michigan.

Among the problems with this reasoning is the staggering juridical importance given to Martin Luther King, Jr.  Tatters of his speeches may sound fine, but they do not constitute the document under which the American regime was founded and by which it is supposedly governed.  Moreover, it is simply untrue that King devoted his life to opposing affirmative action.  King emphatically endorsed the distribution of jobs and other economic opportunities on the basis of racial representation.  He asserted that (and more) in a 1965 Playboy interview.  The decision by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is totally consistent with the expressed views of King and of civil-rights activists Thurgood Marshall, Whitney Young, Julian Bond, and Maynard Jackson.

Los Angeles Times polls of February 6 and June 26 indicate that two thirds of the respondents resist out-and-out quotas, yet the overwhelming majority expressed deep concern about prejudice directed against racial, “gender,” and ethnic minorities.  These respondents accepted the awarding of preferences but insisted on having them go to “those who are economically deprived.”  In this case, what people actually think is less important than what they profess to want.  The profession indicates what they assume to be the moral high ground.  This, of course, has nothing to do with the reality that hits us in the face, one in which black bigotry can be vented freely in universities and in entertainment, while those ultimate victimizers—white Christian males—are increasingly restricted in what they are allowed to say about other groups.

Such behavior is not to be wondered at in a society that Chavez finds more “just” than it used to be—that is, one invaded by government social engineers.  What is surprising is that someone who celebrates the major bureaucratic intrusions of the 60’s, together with the demographic reconstruction of the country, should treat affirmative action as a “ludicrous” departure from other developments to which it is clearly related.  Does Chavez honestly believe that a decade that witnessed a remaking of the American people by bureaucratic agencies would not end, as it did, by imposing racial quotas?  Who would stop this from happening?  Certainly not newly mobilized black voters or Hispanic immigrants, who would be the beneficiaries of quotas.

What the Supreme Court did was to prohibit explicit racial quotas of the kind that the University of Michigan Law School applied to its candidates for admission.  No attempt was made to keep the voters of Michigan or of any other state from banning racial or sex preferences.  Nothing the Court did can keep us from voting for presidential candidates who, unlike Al Gore and George W. Bush, come out foursquare against affirmative action.  Unfortunately, many of those now grumbling wish to have it both ways—to be able to vote for affirmative-action maniacs, such as Al Gore, or klutzy equivocators, such as President Bush, while getting the Court to decide the matter without regard to the electoral will.  Arguably, the American people should be forced to stew in their own juices.  Perhaps they will come to view quotas, by whatever name, as being as much of a wedge issue as prescription drugs, or they may be jerked into behaving like their Australian “democratic” cousins, who now have extended special rights to Muslims as well as to gays and Aborigines.  Let those who vote decide for themselves.  Just don’t expect the courts to let irresponsible voters off the hook, and don’t fabricate counterhistorical civil-rights movements by imputing to the dead political positions they never held.