Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (64 page)

Gerald Ford used every bit of his presidential incumbent power to narrowly stave off Ronald Reagan’s challenge at the 1976 Republican National Convention. But Nixon’s pardoner and the steward of a poor economy lost to the “untainted” and unknown former Democratic
governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Black hopes were high until the austere Carter administration, to boost the economy, started unprecedented cuts in social welfare, health care, and educational programs while increasing military spending. From the lowest Black poverty rate in US history in 1973, the decade ended with record unemployment rates, inflation, falling wages, rising Black poverty rates, and increasing inequality. At the local level, struggling activists and residents partially or totally blamed corporate-friendly Black politicians for the growing poverty. There was supposedly something wrong with
Black
politicians. Unsurprisingly, no one ever uncovered any evidence to substantiate this political racism of Black politicians. Black politicians and the Black elites they largely served were hardly different from the politicians and elites of other races, selling out to the highest bidders or sticking to their antiracist and/or racist principles.
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While racist Blacks blamed
Black
politicians—and increasingly
Black
capitalists—for their socioeconomic struggles, racist Whites blamed Black people and affirmative action for their struggles in the 1970s. Racist ideas put all of these Americans out of touch with reality—as out of touch as one White male aerospace engineer who wanted to be a doctor. Allan Bakke was over thirty-three when the medical school at the University of California at Davis turned him away a second time in 1973, citing his “present age” and lukewarm interview scores as the main factors in the rejection. By then, more than a dozen other medical schools had also turned him away, usually because of his age. In June 1974, Bakke filed suit against the University of California Regents—the body that had fired Angela Davis four years earlier. He did not allege age discrimination. He alleged that his medical school application had been rejected “on account of his race,” because UC Davis set aside sixteen admissions slots out of one hundred for “disadvantaged” non-Whites. Agreeing, the California courts struck down the “quota” and ordered his admission.

The US Supreme Court decided to take
Regents v. Bakke
. Bakke’s lawyers argued that the quota system had reduced his chances for admission by forcing him to compete for eighty-four slots instead of the full one hundred. The Regents’ lawyers argued the state had a
“compelling . . . interest” in increasing California’s minuscule percentage of non-White doctors. Since they generally received inferior K–12 educations, non-Whites tended to have lower college grade point averages (GPAs) and test scores than Whites—thus the need to set aside sixteen seats. And despite their lower scores, these non-White students were indeed qualified, said the Regents’ lawyers. Ninety percent of them graduated and passed their licensing exams, only slightly less than the White percentage.

The biggest irony and tragedy of the
Regents v. Bakke
case—and the affirmative action cases that followed—was not Allan Bakke’s refusal to look in the mirror of his age and interviewing prowess. Instead, it was that no one was challenging the admissions factors being used: the standardized tests and GPA scores that had created and reinforced the racial disparities in admissions in the first place. The fact that UC Davis’s non-White medical students had much lower Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores and college GPAs than their fellow White medical students, but still nearly equaled their graduation and licensing exam passage rates, exposed the futility of the school’s admissions criteria. Since segregationists had first developed them in the early twentieth century, standardized tests—from the MCAT to the SAT and IQ exams—had failed time and again to predict success in college and professional careers or even to truly measure intelligence. But these standardized tests had succeeded in their original mission: figuring out an “objective” way to rule non-Whites (and women and poor people) intellectually inferior, and to justify discriminating against them in the admissions process. It had become so powerfully “objective” that those non-Whites, women, and poor people would accept their rejection letters and not question the admissions decisions.

Standardized exams have, if anything, predicted the socioeconomic class of the student and perhaps a student’s first-year success in college or in a professional program—which says that the tests could be helpful for students
after
they are admitted, to assess who needs extra assistance the first year. And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a
poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning.
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With four justices solidly for the Regents, and four for Bakke, the former Virginia corporate lawyer whose firm had defended Virginia segregationists in
Brown
decided
Regents v. Bakke
. On June 28, 1978, Justice Lewis F. Powell sided with four justices in viewing UC Davis’s set-asides as “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority,’” allowing Bakke to be admitted. Powell also sided with the four other justices in allowing universities to “take race into account” in choosing students, so long as it was not “decisive” in the decision. Crucially, Powell framed affirmative action as “race-conscious” policies, while standardized test scores were not, despite common knowledge about the racial disparities in those scores.
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The leading proponents of “race-conscious” policies to maintain the status quo of racial disparities in the late 1950s had refashioned themselves as the leading opponents of “race-conscious” policies in the late 1970s to maintain the status quo of racial disparities. “Whatever it takes” to defend discriminators had always been the marching orders of the producers of racist ideas. Allan Bakke, his legal team, the organizations behind them, the justices who backed him, and his millions of American supporters were all in the mode of proving that the earth was flat and the United States had moved beyond racism in 1978. These racists happily consumed the year’s most prominent and acclaimed race relations sociological text,
The Declining Significance of Race
, and spun William Julius Wilson’s arguments to proclaim that race no longer mattered. The University of Chicago sociologist attempted to solve the racial paradox of the late 1970s: the rise of the Black middle class and the fall of the Black poor. Wilson characterized the post–World War II era “as the period of progressive transition from racial inequalities to class inequalities.” The “old barriers” of racial discrimination that restricted “the entire black population” had transformed into the “new barriers” restricting the Black poor. “Class has become more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power,” Wilson wrote.

Wilson did not acknowledge the racial progress for some and the progression of racism for all. As Wilson’s antiracist critics pointed out, he neglected the evidence showing the rising discrimination faced by rising middle-income Blacks—a point Michael Harrington’s
The Other America
had already made in 1962. Wilson focused his scholarly lens on the economic dynamics that created an urban Black “underclass,” a class made inferior, behaviorally, by its wrenching poverty.
⁵

Assimilationist underclass scholarship in the late 1970s and early 1980s looked over at “ghetto ethnography,” those assimilationist anthropologists reconstructing the supposed substandard cultural world of non-elite urban Blacks. “I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a nigger,” complained a factory worker in the introduction to the classic antiracist ethnography of the era,
Drylongso
(1980). Syracuse anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney—who is blind—allowed his Black interviewees to construct their
own
cultural world. The
New York Times
characterized
Drylongso
as “the most expansive and realistic exposition of contemporary mainstream black attitudes yet published.”
⁶

On the thirty-third anniversary of
The Declining Significance of Race
, when scholars were once again pitting class over race to explain racial inequities, Wilson did what only the best scholars have found the courage to do: he admitted the book’s shortcomings and confessed that he should have advanced “both race- and class-based solutions to address life chances for people of color.”
⁷

It was these race- and class-based solutions that Justice Thurgood Marshall had tried to will into existence in his separate dissenting opinion for
Regents v. Bakke
. The dissenting opinion of Harry Blackmun, the decider in
Roe v. Wade
, came last. Blackmun gave America a timeless lesson: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Fourteenth Amendment perpetuate racial supremacy.” But that was exactly what racists intended to do. Supporters of affirmative action were “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination,” argued Yale law professor and former solicitor general Robert Bork. In the
Wall Street Journal
, Bork ridiculed the Supreme Court’s decision to keep a limited form of affirmative action. Bork and others like him used the Fourteenth Amendment to attack antiracist initiatives over the next few decades, leaving behind only the wreckage of widening racial disparities. Four years after
Regents v. Bakke
, White students were two and a half times more likely than Black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and universities. By 2004, that racial disparity had doubled.
⁸

AS
1960
S GAINS
unraveled and poverty spread in the late 1970s, a growing number of Black people grew alienated from the US political system. As their alienation grew, the racist ideas about them grew. Black voters looked down on Black nonvoters as inferior. The nonvoters, they believed, had callously disregarded the blood shed for Black voting rights, had stupidly given up their political power, and as such were immoral and uncaring. Black nonvoters—or third-party Black voters like Angela Davis—clearly were not being driven to the polls by fear of Republican victories. They seemed to be only willing to vote
for
politicians, as Angela Davis began to realize.
⁹

On November 19, 1979, the Communist Party announced its presidential ticket for the 1980 election. Sixty-nine-year-old Gus Hall, the longtime head of the CPUSA, was once again running for president. His newest running mate had reached the constitutionally required age of thirty-five on January 26. She had just joined the faculty at that historic campus where Black Studies had been born thirteen years earlier, San Francisco State University. Angela Davis agreed to partake in her first campaign for public office. But that does not mean Davis and other non-White members were totally happy with the CPUSA. The lack of diversity in the CPUSA leadership remained a source of conflict within the party in the 1980s.
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Nor was Davis happy with the decline of antiracist activism, which was slowing in the midst of—or rather, because of—the growing production and consumption of racist ideas in the late 1970s. “In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist,” thundered Angela Davis in September 1979 at the Oakland Auditorium.
She joined with Bay Area politicians and activists in urging protests against the upcoming Nazi rally nearby. All decade long, Davis’s National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression had steadily challenged the growing Klan and Nazi groups. The Klan almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980, unleashing its gun-toting terrorism in more than one hundred towns to try to destroy the gains of the 1960s. Lynchings were still occurring—at least twelve were committed in Mississippi in 1980, twenty-eight Black youngsters were killed in Atlanta from 1979 to 1982, and random street-corner executions took place in Buffalo in 1980. But Klan violence and lynchings by private citizens paled in comparison to the terror being perpetrated by gangs of policemen across the nation, from strip-searches and sexual abuse of Black women to pistol-whipping of Black males. By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.
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“We can break this vicious cycle of racism, sexism, unemployment and inflation created by those who always put profits before people,” Davis blared on posters announcing her campaign rallies in 1980. The Communist politicos had to get the word out about their campaign stops because their party received much less media attention than President Jimmy Carter, who was campaigning for reelection, and Ronald Reagan, who had finally secured the Republican nomination. In early August 1980, Angela Davis brought her “People Before Profits” campaign back to the place where her public life had begun: UCLA. She lamented about the poor turnout of the media. “It’s part of a conspiracy to prevent us from getting our message to the people,” she said, sitting at a table with undistributed press packets. “If Ronald Reagan were holding a press conference here you wouldn’t have been able to see anything for blocks, there would have been so much press here.”
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