BAMN Strikes Again
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…
The austere and backward-thinking Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigration Rights By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is determined to overturn a race-neutral law and put government discrimination and preferences back on the books.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that BAMN filed suit this week challenging—again—Proposition 209, which barred government discrimination and preferences in California.
BAMN contends that racial minorities have a constitutional right to preferential treatment, and says Prop. 209 “promised a ‘color-blind’ Constitution. But this was and is a lie…[It] has created a racial caste system in which the state’s most prestigious schools train mostly white students and students from some Asian backgrounds while admitting Latina/o, black and Native American students at only a third of their presence among the high school graduates of the state.”
Did BAMN’s lawyers really think “color blind” meant “equality of outcome”? Any reasonable person knows there’s no such thing. A color blind government policy removes discrimination and preferences. A color blind government policy keeps race and ethnicity out of the equation, a goal civil rights movement participants and supporters fought to reach.
BAMN also asserts that Prop. 209 violates the Equal Protection Clause “by forcing minority students and their supporters to sponsor an onerous and almost certainly futile statewide referendum in order to secure the adoption of lawful affirmative action programs. Every other group, however, retains the right to secure a change in admission policies that are in its members’ interest by a simple majority vote of the Regents or their subordinate bodies.”
Every voter acts in his own best interests. Sometimes, he also acts in the best interests of his group(s). Doing so doesn’t make the individual or group necessarily wrong or the law unconstitutional. People who voted for and against Prop. 209 did so in their best interests. One side lost, and the other side won. Is BAMN arguing that the whole process is unconstitutional, because the minority doesn’t get its way? Isn’t this how the process works? Otherwise, why permit a voting process at all?
BAMN cites Grutter v. Bollinger to support its quest for California to discriminate and prefer based on race. The Supreme Court held that the University of Michigan law school’s use of race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of minorities was narrowly tailored to further a compelling interest in “obtaining the educational benefits that flow from” skin deep-only diverse student body. However, the court didn’t compel states to consider race in admissions; states may consider race in admissions. The majority of voters in California do not want their government to consider race.
Incredibly, BAMN says California’s law barring racial discrimination and preferences is akin to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that states were permitted to enact laws that separated the races, as long as segregated facilities were “equal.”
In Plessy, the government mandated racial discrimination. It set out specifically to keep the races separate. In contrast, Prop. 209 bars the government from such actions. A racially neutral standard won’t ever produce equal outcomes. No law can do that. But the law does assure individuals that their state is not permitted to deny them college admission, a job, or a contract because they’re black, or white, or Asian, or a woman, or a follower of Joseph Smith.
BAMN also invokes Brown v. the Board of Education to bolster its claims, a double shame. The court held that racial segregation denied black children equal protection of the law. States created separate schools for different races. Prop. 209 doesn’t do that. If some schools end up majority one race, it isn’t because the government mandated separate schools. A consequence of a racially neutral law is that a school may end up majority black or white, but not by government mandate. That’s the point. Solving this “problem” shouldn’t be within the government’s purview. The government is restrained from coercing individuals and/or treating them differently based on race.
In hilariously hyperbolic language, BAMN calls California’s race-neutral law a “Tuskegee-like experiment” and implies minority students are “suffering” under the law. That’s the way to lift people up — speak of them in terms of oppressed victims too ignorant to help themselves.
Read the full text of the complaint.
Before I go, I must include this quote from George B. Washington, BAMN’s lead lawyer. He told the Chronicle that his group must overturn the law, because the American Civil Rights Institute was “going to go and play bully boy with minorities in states like Utah and Arizona.” As we mentioned earlier this week, Utah seeks to bar its government from discriminating against and preferring individuals or groups based on race.
Good for Utah and for the doctrine of racial neutrality.
