Made by History Perspective

How the Reagan

administration
stoked fears of anti-
white racism
The origins of the politics of reverse
discrimination."
By Justin Gomer and Christopher Petrella October 10

About the authors "

The Justice Department has begun investigating affirmative action

policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina to determine if
they discriminate against white applicants. This investigation conveniently
overlooks the most significant affirmative action policy at universities, one
that overwhelmingly benefits white applicants: legacy admissions.

The DOJs assault on affirmative action programs at American colleges,

combined with its indifference toward legacy admission policies, reveals a
department driven by the belief that white people are the primary victims
of racial discrimination. That position is of a piece with Republicans long-
standing opposition not just to affirmative action programs that benefit
people of color, but to civil rights legislation as a whole. And it
demonstrates the persistence and power of the idea of reverse
discrimination.

More than any other modern U.S. president, it was Ronald Reagan who
cultivated the concept of so-called reverse discrimination, which emerged
in the 1970s as a backlash against affirmative action in public schooling as
court-ordered busing grew throughout the country. During these years, a
growing number of white Americans came to believe civil rights programs
and policies had outstretched their original intent and had turned whites
into the victims of racial discrimination.

Affirmative action policies, particularly in education, became the primary

target of this complaint, and by the end of the Seventies, the Supreme
Court began to hear regular challenges to these programs. In 1978,
affirmative action opponents won their first victory in Regents of the
University of California v. Bakke, which outlawed a race-conscious
admissions policy for the medical school at the University of California at
Davis.

Opponents of affirmative action found even more support among

conservative officeholders. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began
to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for
affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse
discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of
Lets Make America Great Again, Reagan campaigned vigorously against
affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies
that mandated, in his view, federal guidelines or quotas which require
race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.

Once in office, Reagans Justice Department backed cases that challenged

affirmative action programs in hopes of eliminating them entirely. The
Supreme Court proved uncooperative, however, and repeatedly ruled in
favor of existing programs, both in college admissions and job hiring.

In the absence of legal support, Reagans assault on affirmative action

required political cunning. The president established a two-pronged
approach to circumvent existing civil rights laws. First, his administration
simply stopped enforcing laws of which it disapproved. Reagans secretary
of labor, for example, implemented new federal compliance guidelines
that exempted as many as 75 percent of companies contracting with the
federal government from previously mandatory affirmative action
programs.

Second, Reagan fundamentally restructured the composition of federal

courts and the governments civil rights enforcement apparatus, which
included the Justice and Labor departments and the Commission on Civil
Rights. Reagan removed affirmative action supporters from their posts
and re-staffed a significant portion of the DOJ and the Commission on
Civil Rights with people like William Bradford Reynolds, the head of the
Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, who opposed existing civil
rights law.

Under Reynoldss leadership, the DOJ continued to pursue cases that

might ban affirmative action policies once and for all. This was part of a
broader attack on civil rights protections. The DOJ promised to no longer
impose numerical goals or timetables for the hiring of women and people
of color at businesses and government agencies. At the same time, the
Civil Rights Division ignored violations of the Voting Rights Act, while
Clarence Thomas, then the chairman of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission, stopped using class-action suits to enforce
affirmative action hiring programs.

In so much as Reagan cared about a civil rights issue, it was not school
integration or affirmative action but rather reverse discrimination against
white men. Though the rhetoric of reverse discrimination preceded the
Reagan presidency and had spread considerably among affirmative action
opponents in the years before his election, it was the Reagan
administration that first enshrined such assumptions in policy.

The Trump administration promises to enhance these policies. President

Trump has borrowed a page from Reagan by appointing Jeff Sessions, a
longtime opponent of the Voting Rights Act, to the position of attorney
general. Under Sessions, the DOJ promises once again to work to
undermine civil rights law by vociferously opposing reverse
discrimination.

If the actions of the Justice Department during Reagans first term are any
indicator, the recent news about the Justice Departments selective
interventions in college admissions points toward a continued and
expanding effort by the DOJ to limit access to higher education for people
of color. Those efforts are part of a broader anti-civil rights push by the
DOJ, which includes pulling back investigations into police violence,
rescinding DACA protections for undocumented immigrants brought to
the United States as children, and remaining silent amid recent calls from
the president to expand his travel ban.

As in the Reagan era, the Justice Department today can roll back civil
rights protections as easily as it can extend them, and as such, must
remain at the center of any anti-racist struggle against the politics of white
supremacy.

Justin Gomer is assistant professor of American studies at California

State University, Long Beach and working on a book
entitled, "Colorblindness, A Life: The Political and Cultural Biography
of An Ideology." # Follow @ProfessorGomer
Christopher Petrella is a lecturer in American cultural studies at
Bates College. He is completing his first book on the history of white
supremacy in 20th-century New England. # Follow @CFPetrella