Commentary: Affirmative action and America’s original sin

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The furor over the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision days ago about affirmative action demonstrates several things.

The nation’s highest court, by a 6-2 count, upheld a Michigan law approved by the state’s voters in 2006 that says public colleges

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
and universities “shall not discriminate or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”

Commentary button in JPG – no shadowIronies abounded in the decision.

In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy in effect said the Supreme Court lacked the authority to overrule a decision by a state’s voters – an interesting position for a member of a bench that routinely strikes down state laws and once even decided a presidential election.

And, in a vehement dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor contended not just that her fellow justices were blind on matters of race but that the Constitution doesn’t give a majority of voters the power to create roadblocks to progress for minorities – an intriguing position for a legal thinker who generally wants to empower voters.

The issue of race has been putting Americans in difficult – and often tragic – positions for centuries.

There is a reason that race has been called America’s original sin. The struggle to get right with our legacy of enslavement and discrimination that helped produce the greatest civil war in human history in the 19th century and a long and linked series of political and cultural battles in the 20th and 21st centuries that at times have threatened to tear the country apart.

Some wrongs take a long time and a lot of work to make right.

A century and a half ago, in his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln said of the Civil War and, by extension, the struggle to heal America’s deep racial wounds:

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

In this instance, as in so many others, Old Abe sounds like a prophet.

Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, most intelligent and well-run schools and businesses will continue to practice affirmative action in the wisest and most legally defensible way – by doing aggressive outreach and recruiting to find the best and brightest talent.

They will do it not because the law tells them to, but because it makes good business sense. The economic need for savvier, better-trained labor now drives many of our most heated political battles, such as the pitched struggles over education reform and even the recent fight over marriage equality.

One of the reasons much of the Hoosier business community didn’t want discrimination written into the Indiana constitution was many business leaders feared House Joint Resolution 3 would chase skilled workers out of the state.

But just finding good students and workers won’t solve all the problems presented by discrimination. Affirmative action’s focus always has been on opening opportunity’s door. It doesn’t offer much protection once a member of a discriminated-against group has walked through that door.

There still are significant – and, in some cases, huge – wage gaps between what most women and minorities make and what most white men get paid for identical work.

That is why we as a nation are about to have a long and likely bitter battle over fair wages.

The fact that U.S. Supreme Court justices twisted themselves into sometimes angry and often contradictory knots in their decision regarding affirmative action just shows how thorny the work of resolving this nation’s tragic history of discriminatory practice has been and will continue to be.

America’s original sin, indeed.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.