By Darren Walker
Mr. Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.
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Let’s be honest about the painful reality: America has functioned as a full democracy — guaranteeing the franchise to all — for less than one human lifetime. In practice, our democracy is younger than me.
I was born in 1959, into an America rived by apartheid. When I was a child, the adults in my life were technically eligible to vote. However, in the Louisiana and Texas towns where I grew up, they were prevented from doing so by the social and cultural norms of the American South.
During the first two decades of my life, the American people finally acknowledged this truth and, to borrow a phrase, acted affirmatively to address it. A new generation of American founders mobilized into a great, multiracial movement, challenged our nation to live up to its ideals and initiated a national construction project on the foundation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment (which was violated with impunity for an entire century after the nation ratified it).
In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
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This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.
For me, this is no abstraction. I attended small-town Texas schools roiled by desegregation.
In grade school, I saw the vestiges of Jim Crow firsthand: the dilapidated old Negro facilities, the hanging tree adjacent to the courthouse, the swimming pool closed and filled with concrete in response to court-ordered desegregation.
And then, throughout my childhood, government and other institutions acted affirmatively to change. They began to redress the hypocrisy and harm, reckoning with the countless ways that they had protected power and privilege for some at the expense of others. From the wreckage of a lost century, they began building with laws and policies a more American United States.
I was a beneficiary when President Lyndon Johnson and his administration created a program called Head Start; when he signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, before my fifth birthday; when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law a year later, enabling my mother and millions of people like her to vote for the first time in their lives.
I was a beneficiary when the University of Texas, my alma mater, also acted affirmatively to recruit, admit and retain Black and Latino students, whereas it previously excluded us for the entirety of the institution’s existence.
www.nytimes.com
Mr. Walker is the president of the Ford Foundation.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Let’s be honest about the painful reality: America has functioned as a full democracy — guaranteeing the franchise to all — for less than one human lifetime. In practice, our democracy is younger than me.
I was born in 1959, into an America rived by apartheid. When I was a child, the adults in my life were technically eligible to vote. However, in the Louisiana and Texas towns where I grew up, they were prevented from doing so by the social and cultural norms of the American South.
During the first two decades of my life, the American people finally acknowledged this truth and, to borrow a phrase, acted affirmatively to address it. A new generation of American founders mobilized into a great, multiracial movement, challenged our nation to live up to its ideals and initiated a national construction project on the foundation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment (which was violated with impunity for an entire century after the nation ratified it).
In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.
For me, this is no abstraction. I attended small-town Texas schools roiled by desegregation.
In grade school, I saw the vestiges of Jim Crow firsthand: the dilapidated old Negro facilities, the hanging tree adjacent to the courthouse, the swimming pool closed and filled with concrete in response to court-ordered desegregation.
And then, throughout my childhood, government and other institutions acted affirmatively to change. They began to redress the hypocrisy and harm, reckoning with the countless ways that they had protected power and privilege for some at the expense of others. From the wreckage of a lost century, they began building with laws and policies a more American United States.
I was a beneficiary when President Lyndon Johnson and his administration created a program called Head Start; when he signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, before my fifth birthday; when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law a year later, enabling my mother and millions of people like her to vote for the first time in their lives.
I was a beneficiary when the University of Texas, my alma mater, also acted affirmatively to recruit, admit and retain Black and Latino students, whereas it previously excluded us for the entirety of the institution’s existence.
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