Tobias Barrington Wolff
Professor of Law,
University of California, Davis Law School
Visiting Professor of Law, fall 2006,
|
Tobias Wolff's Racial Equity Progress Timeline
Whenever I teach the affirmative action cases in Constitutional Law, I begin by putting a time-line on the board.
On the far left is the year 1619, the first recorded instance of people
from Africa setting foot on American soil, brought to Jamestown on
slave ships by Dutch traders to become indentured servants.
Around the 1680s, we mark the rise of the race-based chattel slavery
system and the concomitant dedication of resources and industry to the
plantation-based farming that depending upon slave labor.
1788 marks the ratification of the Constitution, with its formal
protection of the slave trade and designation of slaves as constituting
3/5 of a person (but 0/5 of a vote) for purposes of determining
representation in the House and in the Electoral College.
The period leading up to 1865 marks the vast expansion of slavery and
the resulting war that divided the Nation, the most costly in American
lives ever fought.
1867-1877 marks the brief, hopeful birth of Radical Reconstruction,
followed by the great betrayal that left the newly freed Black
Americans to the tender mercies of their former Confederate oppressors.
From that moment through to about 1950 marks the second great period of
darkness: the full flowering of Jim Crow apartheid and the rise of
lynching, when Black bodies regularly and publicly bore the costs of
White spiritual poverty.
1954 brings the first true glimmer of light, the most important Supreme
Court decision of the modern era, Brown v. Board of Education, which
formally and fully recognized the equal humanity of Black citizens for
the first time in our Nation's history.
1964 and 1965 bring the next tiny flames, the Civil Rights Act and the
Voting Rights Act, which made our first national commitment to the
promise of equal citizenship.
Beginning in the early 1970s, it can properly be said that Brown and
its progeny, and the 1964 and 1965 Acts, finally began to be
implemented and enforced in a serious way.
And 1978 begins the period of retrenchment, with the Bakke decision imposing serious limits on affirmative action in education.
The 1989 Croson decision imposing dramatic limitations on affirmative action in business and the professions.
And the 1995 Adarand decision completing the retrenchment with the
formal elimination of the federal government's special constitutional
role in ensuring racial equality.
Thus, the timeline depicts 245 years of indentured servitude and
chattel slavery, followed by 100 years of formal or practical
segregation and terrorism, followed by a scant 10 years of earnest
efforts at progressive reform, followed then by 20 years of
retrenchment that leaves us with the rigid constitutional barriers to
redress that characterize our jurisprudence today.
The visual effect of the period of oppression, 345 years in length,
scornfully overshadowing the pitiful 10-year period of reform and
20-year period of retrenchment, is incredibly powerful. I try to
leave the timeline up for the entire time that we discuss race and the
Constitution, so that my students never lose perspective on the history
against which they are grappling with these questions.
Perhaps we should have posted that timeline on the back wall of the Supreme Court chamber during arguments today.
|
