Should U.S. Supreme Court overturn Michigan anti-affirmation action vote

By Kevin Fobbs

If you are a white student walking into a Michigan college admissions office, you have to be wondering whether you are going to be admitted based on your grades or denied because of your ethnicity. This may soon become the reality for a countless number of white college students across the wolverine state, or America if the U.S. Supreme Court rules to invalidate state voters that voted against using race to determine college admittance in 2006.

Of course racial discrimination is unfair, repugnant and dangerous to the social viability of a nation when it is used to deny the rights of its citizens. The problem which voters in Michigan thought had been corrected was to toss out race-conscious affirmative action admission plans with a fairer race-neutral approach.

At the core of the case is the notion that fifty-eight percent of Michigan voters were seriously in error in amending the Michigan constitution to prohibit discrimination in admission to state colleges on the basis of national origin, sex, race or ethnicity.

To most voters in Michigan this seemed like a relative no-brainer. How could anyone oppose not using discriminatory practices to deny a prospective student entry to college?

It seems that the liberals and race baiters who thrive on erecting barriers to race neutrality and color blind solutions wanted a different result. Instead of desiring to work to determine real solutions to any potential problems minorities might be experiencing in matriculating from high school to college admittance, they took the more convenient route to cry racism!

This approach taken by the civil rights organizations in the state and nationally have determined without much effort, to use a formula that strips sanity from the law and replaces it with fear and racist scare tactics. The goal is to scare the judicial community and moderates who are lukewarm on everything, to abandon common sense and support a fraud which has no foundation in law or on recent facts.

Where is the proof that there is continued discrimination against minorities since the voters in Michigan decided that reverse discrimination is unjustified and beneath the dignity of a state that wants equal treatment for all of its citizens? What about a state's sovereignty under the 10th Amendment, where the state and its citizens have a right to determine its own course in order to balance justice and equality under the law?

Another key question of law which the court must grapple with is whether or not a state amendment that bars discrimination in its constitution can be found to be unconstitutional because it does not allow discriminatory practices and remedies.

Are you confused now?

You should be, because in effect, what the advocates of affirmative action are arguing is that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment should allow a state to openly and intentionally discriminate against a race or ethnic group as a means to remedy previous discriminatory practices.

Michigan Solicitor General John Bursch, was quoted by Click on Detroit, as stressing in his brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, "Until now, no court has ever held that, apart from remedying specific past discrimination, a government must engage in affirmative action."

This is crucial and central to the legal subterfuge which has been erected by civil rights advocates. If the U.S. Supreme Court is not trying to remedy past discriminatory practices against minorities by negating those practices as it did in the 1954 Brown case, how can it force a state to willingly and legally engage in discriminatory practices against whites as a matter of law!

What is even more mind numbing for those who desire to advocate a race-neutral color blind approach to enforcement of the law is how cavalier the opponents of race neutral solutions bemoan the difficulties of using race-based solutions. The fact is clear; the advocates of affirmative action want to continue to divide America into racial camps which perpetuate a myth of continuous inequality that is largely non-existent in 21st century America.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, The imagined legal barrier that the Michigan voters erected was illegal because it does not allow colleges to now use their "political" option to discriminate against whites. By allowing race-based solutions for admittance, suggests Michigan-based attorney, George Washington, colleges could continue their previous practices. He went on to say, "Proposal 2 deprived racial minorities of equal political rights by prohibiting the governing bodies [of public universities] from adopting by simple majority vote any plan that granted 'preferential treatment' to minority applicants."

In short, attorney Washington is stressing that universities that are largely governed by liberal administrators and admission policies, should be allowed to use their liberal political mandate to discriminate against other races, as long as they are not minority.

Now here is a plan. Why not simply spend the time, money and effort used to defend legal discriminatory warfare against those who are not minorities and instead work on race neutral solutions. Sure, it might be more difficult to craft because it takes effort, imagination and tenacity.

But in the end, the color blind solution will produce a legally justifiable outcome based on America's foundation of "One nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."

( Let me know what you think )

© Kevin Fobbs