Court Ruling on Civil Rights

The recent pronouncements of the Supreme Court against affirmative action must be judged within the context of the times. The United States is no longer an ascending world power, confident of its ability to solve all problems. To the contrary, having reached middle age, it seeks to define its goals and priorities in accordance to its declining strength in the world stage.

As this country faces increasing challenges to its homogeneity from societies as dynamic and pugnacious as Japan, it finds itself forced to maximize its available resources within a more limited framework of utilization. Since white males have been the traditional beneficiaries of the nation’s mechanisms of economic and political power distribution, it should come as no surprise that the attempt is now being made to protect their historical turf.

In addition, it is also important to recognize that, having always had access to the infrastructure of old boy networks as well as to relatively good schools, this group may well indeed be better “qualified” than the minorities and women who are now competing with them for the few good jobs available.

What bothers me the most about present attitudes are not that affirmative action is being done away with (actually, there was never any affirmative action, but simply the attempt to give the appearance of such by putting a few blacks and Latinos in positions where they could exercise power over their own kind: policemen, social workers, teachers, etc.), but that there seems to exist a desire of large segments of the public to forget and even negate the effects of racism in its present and past modalities.

How did it come to this? I suspect that the loss of the nation’s sensitivity to racial issues coincides with the aging of the “baby boom” generation and the disillusionment of many of the radicals of the 1960s with the Third World and minorities in general.

Disillusionment with Third World corruption was soon transferred to disenchantment with minorities in this country.

Ronald Reagan came into the national stage just at the right historical time to deal with these issues. He convinced much of the country that there is very little wrong with America, and that a great deal is wrong with those who are not Americans or who at least retain ties, no matter how tenuous, to lands less innocent and pure than America.

Foreigners and minorities thus came to be seen no longer as the victims but rather as the victimizers of a pure and innocent America.

RAMON OCEGUERA

San Diego