In the past year or so, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court has quietly transformed the Court from a constitutional arbiter to an unelected, but supreme, legislative body. On a variety of issues, the majority has demonstrated an eagerness to supplant legislative decision making with its own brand of right and wrong. Regarding the role of race in American society, the majority justices have been especially confident of their own unrealistic views, and that confidence has been shown in their dismemberment of the Voting Rights Act, and has continued with their decision upholding the elimination of affirmative action in Michigan. As far as racial discrimination and its ugly impact on American life goes, everything to the new majority is history, and history from a long time ago.
Which makes all the more interesting the current brawl over comments by Cliven Bundy (the freeloader from Nevada who shared his thoughts on “the Negro” with the New York Times) and Donald Sterling (the Clippers owner who allegedly unloaded on his female friend about bringing people of color to the games, and how weird is that story anyway). It’s too bad the order of these developments happened the way it did, because it’s hard to imagine the Court could have been so dismissive of race in our lives if the Bundy and Sterling comments had been in full bloom across the nation’s press and TV screens prior to their Voting Rights decision.
Of course the real root of our current national involvement with racial discrimination has been neither Bundy nor Sterling, but the essentially racist reaction to the person of the 44th President of the United States, from much of the political right. We have been listening to threatening and scary right wing racial code talk for much of the past four years, and I suspect it’s going to get worse before the mid term elections are over. In the next few months, it will be harder, not easier, for the new Court majority to sell the story that discrimination and its effects are gone from American life. And that will be true even as President Obama’s achievements of behalf of justice and fairness for the American people become ever more self-evident.
