Tuesday’s vote in Houston in favor of a municipal affirmative action program was remarkable less because it was in Houston, big, brash and conservative, than because it was in favor. In recent years–certainly since the Republican capture of Congress in 1994 but probably going back as far as the Reagan administration–the trend of public opinion and judicial decision-making has been against schemes of preference, especially those based on race.
The likelihood is that Houston represents not a break in that trend, but a blip, an exception. Because the fact is that affirmative action has always been a race against the clock (or perhaps the calendar), an attempt to do as much restorative justice as possible before memories of the old injustices grow dull and the case for restoration begins to seem less morally compelling than morally ambiguous.
What Americans must hope, now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for the dismantling by plebiscite of public affirmative action (private programs are unaffected), is that enough progress has been made that it may become self-generating. Two-thirds of blacks, for example, are now members of the middle class, as opposed to one-third three decades ago. One hopes they have become solidly enough entrenched that their children will need no special consideration in college admissions (or, if they do, that they’ll get it as children of alumni, an establishmentarian form of affirmative action).
Once upon a time, of course, municipal affirmative action would have been unnecessary. Blacks, succeeding to political dominance in cities, would have used patronage and the spoils system to take care of friends, relatives and other members of their communities, just as white ethnics did before them. (Surely no one believes all those municipal contracts historically went to low-bidders and those jobs as policemen, firemen and judges to high scorers?)
But the spoils system and patronage are largely gone, replaced by civil service with its rules and exams and its scientific criteria of merit. That, no doubt, is for the best, given the abuses we see in Chicago, for example, with its “buddy system.”
But for those who had been excluded in the past from the resources that would have equipped them to meet those civil service criteria, this change posed the problem of justifying a departure from the rules, from “merit.” Affirmative action became that justification–and a worthy one. When an entire segment of society has been unjustly denied the chance to compete on an equal footing, allowances must be made.
But it is a fact of life that they will not be made indefinitely. Memories are short–fewer than half the Americans now alive can remember when racial segregation was part of our national legal landscape. Allowances can come to be thought of as entitlements–witness those black students at the University of Illinois at Chicago seeking continued priority registration. And there is, after all, an American ideal of equal justice under law, without regard to such accidents of birth as race, gender and ethnicity.
Our hope, as the sun sets on affirmative action, must be that we have used the day well and wisely, creating a land where that ideal can truly flourish.
