Another Step Closer

The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed on Wednesday, albeit narrowly, that the judicial system is a proper legal guardian of efforts not only to prevent new job discrimination but also to make up for injustices of the past.

It is an enlightened decision, fully in keeping with the high standards of equal protection for all citizens that the Constitution sets for the nation, moving the court one more important step along the tortured path that it has traveled on affirmative-action cases for two years.

With Justice William J. Brennan Jr. writing for the majority, the court upheld, by a 5-4 vote, a plan negotiated by a federal judge that requires the state of Alabama to promote a black state trooper every time it promotes a white trooper. The Alabama plan is to remain in effect until 25% of the state’s higher-ranking troopers are black.

Earlier affirmative-action cases have focused on hiring practices, and on the question of whether programs designed to offer more jobs to blacks and other minorities were unfair in that quotas would mean fewer jobs for the white majority. To arrive at the Wednesday decision, the court for the first time addressed the same question of balance and fairness on the issue of promotions. Promotions, it ruled, can use the same “race-conscious” quotas that it earlier found necessary to prevent discrimination in hiring.

Common sense tells you that the exclusion of minorities from entry-level jobs will stack the deck against them in later years when promotions are handed out.

Even though she dissented in the Alabama case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor described past hiring practices in the Alabama Department of Justice as “reprehensible.” To Brennan they represented such “pervasive, systematic and obstinate discriminatory conduct” that they created a “firm justification” for the promotion quota fashioned by the federal judge.

“Discrimination at the entry level necessarily precluded blacks from competing for promotions and resulted in a departmental hierarchy dominated exclusively by non-minorities,” Brennan said.

The Administration argued that the quota system was “profoundly illegal,” and a form of discrimination in reverse, but only President Reagan’s appointees--Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices O’Connor and Antonin Scalia--and Justice Byron R. White agreed with that.

Once again Brennan led a majority of justices in the direction he wanted to go on a crucial issue of citizens’ rights. Once again he found the support that he needed to reject the Reagan Administration view of affirmative action, which has argued that justice, as represented by the court system, should be colorblind. What the majority seemed to say in the Wednesday decision is that the courts will be colorblind once society as a whole accepts that noble way of looking at things. And once again Brennan’s leadership will move society one step closer to that ideal goal.