By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, early, and I’m just in from a swim at the Sands.
I swim off the beach, with rubber shoes, against the tide.
As I watched the sun come up over Lady’s Island, my thoughts darted hither and yon but came back to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning affirmative action — overturning the concept of giving a college applicant points for being Black.
We remember this concept originated in the 60s — Lyndon Johnson admitting that black college applicants could not compete with white applicants and the American government was going to fix that problem. Lyndon reminding us we were atoning for slavery and its invidious iterations. Sandra Day O’Conner later adding the fix would take 25 years.
Our current Supreme Court now says that if you award these extra points to Black applicants and hurt any other group — Asian Americans in particular — you violate the Constitution.
Its decision also says that a Black applicant may mention a traumatic race-based experience in her essay, but skin color can’t be the basis for admission.
When I applied to George Washington Law School (in 1967) I believe I got extra points because I was from South Carolina. GW advertised itself as a “National” law school — that it had students from every state in the Union — but most of its applicants were from the Northeast, many from the Ivy League.
There were few applicants from the South and fewer from South Carolina. I think I was chosen, in part, to bring some regional diversity into the student mix.
It was about the same time GW decided that women were under-represented at the law school, and I think that they were recruited getting extra points if points were needed.
And now those extra points are radioactive. One also wonders about federal construction contracts limited to Black contractors — and whether there will be similar efforts to end these “set asides.”
But affirmative action did get Clarence Thomas and a host of other minority applicants into Yale, Harvard and Chapel Hill. Studies further show that affirmative action has gotten these folks into top tier “white shoe” law firms and into upper-level corporate governance.
But these same studies show that Blacks (and women) do not then move into the C-Suite; or acquire partner status in proportional numbers. Blacks and women get their boarding pass, but so far few have won the penultimate prize. In proportional numbers. Not yet.
Some say that this failure confirms the system is racist.
Confirmation of this systemic pathogen is currently underway at NPR where almost every story — be it barbecue or bank lending — has a racial component. Yesterday we learned that there is a long standing history of keeping Black cooks out of North Carolina’s “whole hog” barbecue pits.
NPR’s efforts are countered by Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley who dispute the systemic charge and will, no doubt, be mailing fund raising letters to North Carolina’s white barbecue- and cole slaw-eating primary voters.
In the meantime the drumbeat for reparations marches on with California leading the way. California’s proposed legislation provides a variety of benefits for those who can point to ancestors who were transported from West Africa.
Overall, however, 68% of Americans still say “no” to cash payments paid directly to descendants of slaves. Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) are 79% against (reparations) versus 17% in favor. Americans between 35 and 50 years of age are also against by a margin of 73% to 25%. Millennials, however, are more receptive.
Millennials are those born between 1980 and 1994. While they are against reparations 49% to 40%, 11% of these middle-aged folk are not sure. This means that more than half of the current Millennials are willing to consider cash payments.
Millennials have had an uneven record when it comes to voting; but as these people move into middle age they will bring their perceptions of race and recompense with them. Perhaps they will tilt the table in favor of reparations as the Baby Boomers evaporate taking their opposition to the promised land.
My own, admittedly anecdotal evidence confirms that inter-racial dating is the norm in most American high schools. Should that morph into inter-racial marriage, and mixed race children, then, maybe, “identity politics” will fade. This seems to be the trend in the United Kingdom.
Maybe the kids will fix this problem by blurring the colors, cooling the racial rhetoric, changing our tormented landscape one child at a time.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
