Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [48]
In a confidential 1971 White House memo titled “Dividing the Democrats,” Buchanan recommended strategies for luring blue collar and Southern whites from the Democratic Party. With frequent references to George Wallace, Buchanan proposed a series of manipulations to pit South against North, white against black, and blue collar against white collar. He suggested wooing Poles, Irish, Slovaks, and Italians and spurning blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians, “the darlings of the mass media” who just happened to be dark-skinned. He recommended attacking the “loafing classes” and the “welfare mommas” and urged Nixon to “tear up the pea patch” by seeking “a constitutional end to the national pressure to integrate races in housing and schooling.” Years later, Nixon described Buchanan as “a decent, patriotic American . . . but he has some strong beliefs that I believe are wrong.”25 Of course, Nixon had a low bar for “decent.”
“Discrimination in Reverse”
After Nixon resigned in disgrace, Buchanan returned to journalism. In one of his early columns, titled “Discrimination in Reverse,” he launched what would become a lifetime campaign against affirmative action, complaining that the government had become “the paramount practitioner of racism.”
To many, what the government is doing today, in its conscious favoritism toward blacks, feminists, Indians, and the Spanish-speaking, is no more defensible than what the segregationists of another era used to do, for just us white folks.26
Indeed, Buchanan might have had a point—if the government had barred whites from skilled jobs, good schools, lunch counters, voting booths, swimming pools, and public bathrooms. Or if government thugs beat up white men who had the audacity to speak to black women or hanged them for the slightest offenses.
But conservative persecution politics requires a distorted sense of perspective that minimizes discrimination against minorities and magnifies any imposition on the majority, so that the two seem more or less equivalent. At the time that the first affirmative action policies were initiated in the early 1960s, blacks were effectively shut out from skilled jobs and management positions. Even in progressive towns like New York City, job placement agencies illegally used notations like “POK” (person of color) and “NFU” (not for us) to distinguish black job candidates.27
Yet in 1963, white plumbers in Cleveland complained that “special privilege” was involved in the hiring of black plumbers. A clerical employee from Western Electric Co. reported, “Some of the girls who have been with the company a long time think they’re being passed over in favor of less qualified colored girls.” And a construction company lawyer in Philadelphia complained that pressure from the NAACP to employ more blacks in skilled jobs would mean “discrimination against whites.”28 (Six years later, less than one percent of Philadelphia’s 10,000 skilled ironworkers, steamworkers, sheet metal workers, electricians, elevator workers, plumbers, and pipefitters were black. Philadelphia’s overall population at the time was 35 percent black.)29
The first Supreme Court test of affirmative action occurred in 1978, the same pivotal year that the IRS proposed to strengthen desegregation requirements and the year after Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign. In the mid-seventies, the UC Davis School of Medicine had twice rejected Allan Bakke, a white male applicant, even though it had accepted minority applicants with lower academic scores. Bakke sued the university for violating his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court, led by Justice Lewis Powell, ruled in Bakke’s favor and ordered UC Davis to enroll him. In his decision, Powell rejected admission quotas as unconstitutional,