Civil rights sloganeering

              I Greensboro News & Record, Monday, March 4, 1985
I Civil rights sloganeering
Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON — When the
| Reagan administration installed its
own majority on the U.S. Civil
ft%htj5 Commission last year, we
optthjpts hoped that the commission
night make it-
Edwin M.
Yoder Jr.
self more use-
| ful — might:
ve beyond
I its accustomed
I gadfly role and
I develop some
interesting
thoughts.
Instead,
something
strange and
unfortunate
has happened.
Where, it
once buzzed
and chivvied
the government over every imperfection, major and minor, the commission has taken up the ritual cry
of "color blindness" in response to
nearly every civil-rights challenge.
The latest example is the war of
words that broke out when the commission issued a report on the Memphis fire-fighters case. In that
matter, the Supreme Court had said
something rather basic: When an
affirmative-action hiring program
for public employees clashes with
seniority rules, the affirmative-action plan yields.
It seemed a sensible and limited
statement of priorities. But according to the Civil Rights Commission
majority, the court had affirmed
"that race and gender are not proper bases to reward or penalize any
person." Not only does this gloss go
well beyond what the court actually
said; it establishes a rule so rigid
that, under it, almost no affirmative-action program could be justified.
This extreme view did not go unanswered. A commission minority.
Mary Berry and Blandina Ramirez,
were not to be outdone. The majority, they declared, had made a ghastly historical error. Civil-rights laws
"were not passed to give civil lights
to all Americans," only — and, it
would appear exclusively — to victims of historic discrimination and
to them alone!
laKe degree away, and hark what
discord follows. These two extreme
views — that, on the one hand, the
law must be so utterly "color-blind'
as to take no cognizance at all o
race, sex or historical discrimina
tion; that, on the other, it is so col
or- or sex-conscious as to protect no
one who doesn't belong to a previously "disadvantaged" group —
blot out all the middle ground.
"Color-blindness" was the consti
tutional value invoked by Justice
John Marshall Harlan in 1896, when
the court first upheld Jim Crow
laws. It remained a valuable idea
when those laws came under siege
half a century later, and a generation used to legal discrimination
needed new ways to think about the
law. But neither Harlan nor his successors of the '50s and '60s were
appealing to a never-never land of
absolute legal abstractions. They
had in mind a practical standard of
equity and impartiality in the law.
Color blindness, understood in its
historical context and meaning, has
not outlived its relevance. But it is
in clanger of being appropriated to
political sloganeering, calculated to
call reasonable and useful, as well as
invidious, remedies into question.
As if in reaction, Berry and Rami
rez invoke a mirror image of coloi
blindness, according to which civil
rights laws are the exclusive entitle
ment and turf of the disadvantaged.
Indeed, had there been no racial
segregation we would need no civil-
rights laws — as, lacking the history of slavery, we might need no
14th Amendment. But converting
historical truisms into legal doctrines serves no useful purpose.
Here is another manifestation ol
the ultra-individualism that seems
to reign within the Reagan administration as an all-purpose standard
The worth of all government goals
and programs depends on whethei
they meet the test of the invisible
hand of competition. "Color blindness" is the equivalent, in the civil-
rights field, of the mysterious
"market forces" that supposedly
make just apportionment of the
world's goods.
The notion that there might be a
larger community interest, apart
from or transcending your narrow
personal interest and mine, is
aside. Everybody for himself anc
the devil take the hindmost!