When the Gallup Poll asked Americans in July 1964 to identify the top challenge facing the country, 60 percent named racial issues. In the summer of 2012, 1 percent picked race.
These findings reflect the great distance the United States has traveled. Racial tension has not disappeared and probably never will.In the current issue of The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead credits a post-civil rights "Compromise of 1977," encompassing such policies as race-conscious university admissions and the Voting Rights Act, with helping build a black middle class and boost minority representation in government.Yet by the summer 2013, that compromise could be shaken and race could once again roil American politics. That's because the Supreme Court is poised to take up race-conscious admissions today and, later this term, a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Five conservative-leaning justices are on record as skeptics of both.These policies have lasted as long as they have because of compromises -- in which Republicans played a crucial part.In 1977, white applicant Allan Bakke asked the Supreme Court to strike down a University of California program that awarded a fixed number of spots in medical school to African-Americans and other historically disadvantaged minorities.Justice Lewis Powell, an appointee of President Richard Nixon, crafted an opinion that forbade quotas while permitting schools to take individuals' race into account for "diversity."Powell's amorphous rule satisfied neither civil rights advocates, who saw quotas as compensation for past discrimination, nor critics, to whom any use of race is "reverse discrimination." But it proved workable.Asked to overturn Powell's ruling in 2003, the Supreme Court sustained it; Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed in 1981, wrote the key opinion.In 1982, Congress considered an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The debate pitted a rising conservative movement against liberal civil rights organizations determined to expand the law's scope.Congress approved a Powell-like standard, barring proportional representation but taking account of "the extent to which members of the minority group have been elected to public office in the jurisdiction." The architect of the compromise was then-Sen. Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas. Reagan signed it into law.Subsequent history has shown the benefits and defects of each compromise.Between 1976 and 2010, the African-American share of college enrollment rose from 9.4 percent to 14.5 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.The number of black elected officials rose ninefold nationwide between 1970 and 2000. Deep South states have made the most progress. This is revolutionary.Still, using race as "one factor" has often become a euphemism for using it as the decisive factor. That understandably rubs many Americans the wrong way. And access is not the same as success: African-American college students graduate at about half the rate of whites.Race-conscious gerrymandering arguably fuels political polarization in that it encourages the two parties to split the electorate into white and minority districts, then to pitch them mutually exclusive policies.It's in the nature of constitutional litigation for each side in these cases to play down such nuances. Each wants the court to rule clearly and unequivocally in its favor -- to resolve the vexed questions once and for all.I would agree -- if I were equally confident that the rights and wrongs could be so readily defined, constitutionally or otherwise. But I'm not.A century and a half after Gettysburg, half a century after Selma and 35 years after Bakke, we still need practicality and compromise. We need the realism, and wisdom, of Powell, O'Connor and Dole.Charles Lane is a Washington Post editorial writer.lanec@washpost.comHave more to add? News tip? Tell us
