Both sides maneuvered to spin the settlement. Jesse Jackson, who helped raise money to make the case go away, tried to change the subject to discrimination against women. Affirmative-action opponents claimed victory but lamented losing the chance to watch the increasingly conservative Supreme Court use a Piscataway ruling to inflict even more damage on affirmative action. ““Racial preferences are tearing this country apart, and here come these outside groups paying to keep the case out of the Supreme Court,’’ said Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity. ““The people who favor racial preferences are on the run.''
Civil-rights leaders didn’t really disagree. ““There’s an old adage that bad cases make bad law. This was a bad case that would have made dreadful law,’’ said Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League. Movement leaders pushed to settle after the Supreme Court accepted the case for review in June. Fund-raising was spearheaded by the Black Leadership Forum, an umbrella organization of groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Jackson and others hit up individuals, organizations and corporations (especially companies that have developed clear rules that allow them to achieve diversity without provoking lawsuits). ““All of our advisers said, “You are going to get knocked out of the box’,’’ said Joseph Lowery, chairman of the umbrella group.
They were probably right. Most legal scholars agreed that the Supreme Court would side with Taxman. The only question was how badly it might gut affirmative-action policies that are based on achieving racial diversity. The dispute arose when the board needed to cut its staff of 10 business teachers by one. In deciding to keep Williams over Taxman, the school board said it wanted its students to benefit from a racially diverse teaching staff: it wasn’t trying to remedy past discrimination, the more common test. But the board was on shaky legal ground. The Supreme Court has never explicitly endorsed using the goal of racial diversity to make employment decisions.
For the Clinton administration, the settlement ends a case that had exposed its ambivalence over preferences. It first supported the board but earlier this year switched sides–while maintaining that racial diversity is generally a desirable goal. Now both sides are searching for new battles in the war over affirmative action. Meanwhile, Williams and Taxman, who was rehired a few years ago, work side by side. They don’t talk to each other.
WHEN IT COMES TO race, nothing is ever easy. Bill Clinton got a fresh reminder of that basic fact of American life from Newt Gingrich, who blasted the president’s race advisory board last week for failing to hear from opponents of affirmative action when it met at the University of Maryland to discuss diversity in higher education. ““When did your call for a dialog become a monologue?’’ Gingrich wrote to Clinton. ““Is your panel interested in educating our citizens–or indoctrinating them?''
Gingrich wants the panel to hear from conservatives like Ward Connerly, the leader of last year’s successful California ballot initiative to ban racial and gender preferences in public employment, education and contracting. But historian John Hope Franklin, the chairman of Clinton’s board and a staunch supporter of affirmative action, has said that he and Connerly–who is also black–““don’t speak the same language.''
They may soon have to. As it turns out, Clinton has been complaining lately to his own aides that his much heralded initiative on race has become bogged down in bland, feel-good chatter; the president has asked for ways to ““mix it up’’ with critics of affirmative action. Clinton’s aides have prepared a list of ““conservative thinkers’’–including Connerly, Jack Kemp and Oklahoma Rep. J. C. Watts–whom they plan to ask to the White House in December. Clinton will also attend a race-relations ““town hall’’ in Akron, Ohio, next week; aides promise to invite people from both sides of the race debate. ““Real-life discussions about race are often contentious and emotional,’’ says an aide. ““There’s no reason ours shouldn’t be, too.''
