 Last week we spent a lot of time dealing with high electoral politics, canvassing the career of Jesse Jackson, scooting past Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's and presidencies and the campaign, the Bush-Dukakis campaign for, you know, the Willie Horton ad and the way in which racial conversations become subverted into something else, although still remaining quite racial in the context of 1990s politics and something, a process that began decades earlier certainly with the civil rights successes or excesses depending on one's politics. Much of last week's themes were dealing with the submergence of racial discourse and also the racialization of crime and also the further development of coalition politics as we move to a much more racially ethnically mixed society. Now the last two lectures of the course, I can't believe we're already here but we are, I want to continue with my focus on post-silver rights presidencies and public policies, examining in particular how race affected public policy and how cultural symbols still do so much heavy lifting for a much more complicated real world in which we all live. Some of the themes of this week are discussions relating to the presumptions of the permanence of civil rights changes and the presumptions of the goals of civil rights. You know, what is the underlying presumption of integration? What is the race and who speaks for the race? These are themes you're going to pick up in your reading certainly. There will be, as you become accustomed already in this course, overlapping as far as chronology but also policy, court cases and cultural symbols all operating at the same time in overlapping ways. So we left off really in George Bush's presidency. I want to pick up in 1992 with Bill Clinton being elected to the office. He's elected with a, embodying great democratic promise. I mean this is after twelve years of Republicans in control of the White House and, you know, a generation of, of younger people not ever knowing a Democrat in the White House. Bill Clinton comes in with an incredible sense of charisma and it's really, it's really quite astonishing and a clear natural talent to speak to black Americans and a voice that black Americans can recognize. And for African America it becomes a moment of great hope in terms of what the potential or the future might hold. Clinton makes a lot of noise and it turns out to be noise in many ways about his commitment to making a cabinet and a White House administration that, quote, looked like America. This is one of his phrases during the period. Making his administration look like America runs into a problem when he nominates to the position of Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, named Lonnie Gwinear. During this moment in the early years of the Clinton presidency or when he was President-elect, Gwinear was a friend of Bill and FOB was a big deal. If you're a friend of Bill with all of his connections and his wife's connections you might have a real end to becoming part of the White House administration. Lonnie Gwinear is one of these individuals, goes, you know, goes back to law school days with the Clintons. Gwinear had been an advocate for years in law review articles of something called cumulative voting and a process that allowed for greater interest representation, something along the lines that I'm being very crude about it. If there are ten candidates running for an office, you don't just get one vote under cumulative voting. You have ten votes, you spread along the ten candidates. Maybe on a certain issue candidate A really represents your views, you want to give that person five votes. And on a certain issue candidate, I don't know if it did A or B or one or two. Another candidate represents a lot of your opinions, you want to give that person three votes. It's actually a way of hyper democratizing who gets represented in office. It's a process moreover, this is important that the Reagan and Bush Justice departments had sanctioned in over three dozen instances. So it is, it was an embrace of democracy letting the little person have a chance to say something and it was a process that had been embraced by Republican nominated or controlled Department of Justice. However, Bill Clinton as much as he excited the democratic liberal base, he infuriated a conservative base and that conservative base went into attack mode. There had been a phrase that had been really popularized during Ronald Reagan's presidency the phrase The Spin Doctor. Someone who comes in, who doctors up the message, spins it around and turns it into something quite different. Lonnie Guinear is tagged because of her cumulative voting ideology as being a quota queen by conservative media type. She's a quota queen. Now what's the big deal with the phrase? The phrase actually is very clever because it links to two different problems in the American present to the American past. One is this direct connotation of the welfare queen which is a catch phrase in the 80s. Welfare queens were used as individuals, I mean propped up as individuals who were bringing down the American social network and really a blight on the American economy and these were depicted as women, of course the queen. Overwhelmingly African-American, although most welfare recipients are not African-American, but people who capitalized upon the system and took advantage of it. That and the logic of welfare at the time, the more children you had, the more age you received. Now the story is much more complicated than this, but the construction of the image was that the welfare queen was the person responsible for being a real drain on the system. So Guinear's politics or ideologies linked to excess, excess of the state with the welfare queen ideology. But the quota part is also important. That links back earlier than the Reagan presidency by linking it to quotas, something that had come up in the Supreme Court case in Bakke versus the Regents of the University of California, decided in 1978. The Supreme Court cases said that quotas were unconstitutional. Now Bakke, just in a super quick nutshell, Allen Bakke, white man Suze, applies for University of California Davis Medical School, isn't admitted and he discovers through his research that according to scores, in terms of what scores people received on the MCAT, that African-American, Latino applicants got in who scored lower than he did. And then he also discovered that UC Davis, in an attempt to diversify student body, had created a set-aside program that had quotas, that, and I'm making the numbers up here, that we are going to admit up to 20 or at minimum 20. Again, the actual terminology is not important right now, African-American, Latino, medical students into UC Davis with the goal of diversifying our population. Supreme Court weighs in in 1978 saying that such set-aside mandated numbers were unconstitutional. Okay, there it is, I had to mute on, I'm sorry. But you cannot just pick a number and say that that's okay. So Guinear is linked to the excesses of welfare reform or welfare policies in the 1980s, the excesses of civil rights ideology, trying to diversify America through quotas, through the 1970s, decided in 78. People started attacking her, politicians, activists. Clinton famously takes her, she's going to take a retreat to Camp David and takes up her Law Review articles, she's going to think about it. And he comes back from Camp David saying, you know, I've looked at this thing more carefully and, you know, her views are not in line with the kind of politics that I want to practice. And Clinton withdraws the nomination. Even when his Attorney General, Janet Reno, said that Guinear deserved the right to at least present her actual views, the views have been misappropriated. Black liberals felt cheated by Clinton as he made a clear move to the center. They felt he was caving in to a conservative politicians and activists. And whether he was or he wasn't, Clinton does, I mean, on that case with Lonnie Guinear, Clinton does make a very clear move to take up Reagan strategy. If Reagan captured the moderate Democrat, who was fed up and frustrated and brought them over to the Republican camp, Clinton went to take them back, wanted to capture the middle ground voters in America, which as the politics in this country become more conservative meant a dramatic turn or shift to the right. Now in part liberals are concerned because they make this decision as part of a general move away from substantive, embrace of civil rights ideologies and victories of the 1960s. Clinton, it soon seemed, to these liberals and activists was more willing, more than willing to see ground to conservatives in order to steal some of their funder. In fact, here activists during the 1990s being frustrated because Clinton was saying all these things, all these things, in quotes, that Republicans have been talking about for the longest time but claiming credit for them. There's a massive stroke of political leadership, even though it certainly frustrated to no end conservatives and liberals. Now Clinton, although an individual who had his weaknesses, he certainly had incredible strengths and he understood the ability, he had the ability to read the Tenor of the Times. He was aware of repositioning on the national scene against the so-called excesses of the 1960s. And in this course I spent a lot of time talking about taking critical eye, looking at southern states and their policies, states versus federal rights, for example. And while those states still have, or still are quite rich with complications in terms of racial politics, I want to turn my attention for a little bit to the West. This is actually a structural flaw in the course because there's so much material focusing on the southeast. This is a national problem. For the moment we'll just focus on the West. It's in California in the 1990s. It's in California in the 1990s where America sees a new frontier in race politics and this is something that grabs the attention of the nation. California does take up a lot of space, grabs the attention of the nation, and also ends up writing an interesting chapter in Clinton's race politics. I want to talk now about two propositions in the 1990s. One is Proposition 187 called Save Our State, and the second is Proposition 209 called the California Civil Rights Initiative. In 1994, by the way, I'm sorry, for those who don't know, California has this allegedly super democratic process of changing the state constitution that if the citizens of the state garner enough signatures and they float a proposition to change the state constitution, they can enact changes to the constitution. Now it seems democratic on its face, but it's actually been hijacked, I don't know when that started, probably from the beginning, by very strong corporate interest and political activist interest on all sides of the political spectrum that have the resources to hire people to gather signatures. Proposition 187 certainly embodied this kind of organizing logic. Again, it's called Save Our State. It's a proposition heavily supported by then Governor of California Pete Wilson, someone who'd been a moderate Republican who turns aggressively conservative as he begins to put a cast of nine in a presidential campaign, a campaign that ultimately flops miserably. Everybody knows that race and economic issues are politically divisive and that way they can be extremely effective. And this is what Wilson identifies in Prop 187 and seizes his way to put his name on the national screen. Proposition 187 focused on social services. 187 ended, if it were put made law, within public social services, within health services and education for undocumented immigrants, illegal aliens. So it's ending the social network, safety net, excuse me, and education for undocumented immigrants. And it was about addressing a fiscal crisis in healthcare in the state. It was a very real crisis. But it was also cast in racial light. It's a controversial ad that showed nighttime border crossers. Now they're non-racialized, no one ever mentions the race, the advertiser doesn't. But everybody knows that these are Mexicans crossing the border at night. And these unnamed, unraced individuals are depicted in the ad as a pestilent scourge, scourge, like rats invading the house. That they are coming into our state, they are invading it, they're taking it over. 187 does pass. Let's save our state by God. But it's caught up in litigation and ultimately killed when the moderate Democrat, Gray Davis, now the governor of California, dismisses it in 1999. But it takes up, you know, the second half of the decade as far as political energy in the state of California. At the same time Prop 187 is winding its way through the litigation process, California starts debating another proposition, this one in 1996, Prop 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. Now the California Civil Rights Initiative ends discrimination against and preferential treatment for any individual or groups based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. So it ends discrimination against individuals or groups based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. This is, you know, something very much in the tradition of the Civil Rights Heritage, of course. But it also kills preferential treatment for the same groups. It is an anti-affirmative action proposition. As Prop 209 is garnering its votes, you have in the University of California system a series of faculty senate votes, you know, four against the proposition and a state law that's being changed is going to end affirmative action UC system, regardless of what California, excuse me, what Prop 209 does. Affirmative action is killed in the UC system. The numbers of minorities plummet overnight in the flagship schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego. I was teaching at UC San Diego at the time, which never did not have a large African-American population, a student population. It's around two-and-a-half percent. Within one year it's cut in half to one-and-a-half percent. You have at UCLA and in Cal, tremendous drops in numbers of African-American students in the college and also in places like law school. Now what's really important about the California Civil Rights Initiative and anti-affirmative action initiatives in the state is that, you know, a couple different things. There's a hyper focus on race who are talking about, you know, affirmative action and it's going to eliminate the black and brown presence on campuses. It's going to eliminate the chance for black and brown people to, to have a legal opportunity to get certain jobs. But the group that it affected the most was white women. Since affirmative action became a federal policy, white women have overwhelmingly been the group that benefited the most from affirmative action policies and they would be the group most negatively affected and yet that discourse is written out of the conversation in California. Also at the same time as a TV ad appears, it runs for one day. It's like the Willie Horton ad runs just a couple of times in a day. The TV ad runs for one day that claims that Martin Luther King would have supported Proposition 209 taking a few lines from his famous speeches and misrepresenting them. In fact King had gone on the record saying that he was in support of these minority set aside programs then soon to be called affirmative action programs. Jesse Jackson is horrified that these two professors at Berkeley I believe who organized this ad campaign were the ones behind the logic of the California Civil Rights Initiative that they had to appropriate King in that way. They weren't the first and they wouldn't be the last but it's an important sort of legacy or wrestling with the memory of who people like King were. Then you have the issue of the name itself. It's the California Civil Rights Initiative and our post-civil rights age when we are all enlightened on racial issues so our general feeling goes, who's going to be against civil rights? People don't want to be against civil rights. They don't want to be considered racist after all. And so when people go into the ballot booth, election booth and vote it turns out, Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative essentially sails through and it enjoys a majority of African-American support. It enjoys a majority of support from white women and I believe I don't have my notes on this issue in front of me so I'm not going to vouch for it for certain but I think it receives a majority of Mexican-American support as well. If not a majority the numbers are high. When asked about these issues white women responded that they didn't realize that the Civil Rights Initiative would actually, was a voting against their own self-interest. African-Americans made it clear we're four civil rights. They hadn't read the proposition. And Mexican-Americans supported it as well for curious reasons. They support civil rights but they also saw this way of supporting this platform as a way to Americanize themselves even though they already had American citizenship status. So what, taking all these things together, what does it actually lead us to? It leads us to a point where we are today, frankly, of a general dumbing down of discourse and politics and media about race and a general laziness as well amongst the electorate when it comes to thinking about these things. Now it doesn't help this process when you have people making editorial decisions that played our lowest common denominator. This really is a theme of the American political thought, social and cultural thought of the last 20 or 30 years. Lowest common denominator does a really great job of appearing first. So it doesn't help us become more astute thinkers about race and citizenship and belonging and politics when you have people making editorial decisions that capitalize upon racialized notions of blacks as criminal, for instance. Just take this. This is all the attention I'm going to pay to the O.J. Simpson case, although it captivates the United States. The picture you see on your left is the picture that ran in Time Magazine of O.J. Simpson. The actual picture is the one on the right. People know what O.J. Simpson looks like, okay? And this is not a poor, I mean it's not a high quality image but it's not appearing darker because it's not being projected. That is a darkened, clearly darkened picture of O.J. Simpson. So when the cover ran, I feel like that seems, I don't think O.J. is that dark. And then someone got a hold of the actual print from the mug shot, pillar up in arms. What are you doing? The response was, well, by photoshopping things a little bit, it made the image pop. It was the quote, it made the image pop. It was a better image. As if anybody needed to have a better image of O.J. Simpson. It wasn't like he was a mystery. And no matter what you felt about what he did or didn't do, you're still going to buy the magazine cover whether you're going to have a light image or a dark image of O.J. Simpson. The young editor, photographic editor, wasn't around much longer, I believe, at time but he was probably taking the fall for some other editorial decision. Anyway, our national discourse is one that's become increasingly impoverished. And we're still in that moment in our allegedly post-racial today. But it's in this state of affairs, getting back to Clinton now, with Proposition Save Our State, Proposition California Civil Rights Initiative, O.J. Simpson in that bizarre moment. It's in this state of affairs that Bill Clinton travels to University of California, San Diego for its graduation ceremony in 1997. And while there announces a new presidential initiative, a national dialogue on race, or the One America, or the President's Race Initiative, or National Conversational Race, it had all these different titles, it was all the same thing. Clinton wanted to do something really, many of us thought that was really astonishing. Recognizing that there was an impoverished state of affairs in a national conversation about race, this is a person who grows up in the South, grows up around African-Americans, can speak in a vernacular addiction that was reminiscent, or sounded familiar to African-Americans. This is a person who got Black America. It was tremendously popular amongst Black Americans, even despite Lonnie Gwinnir and other missteps along the way. People thought, wow, Clinton's actually going to do something here. He has better position than any other president since Jimmy Carter to do this. The ideas are going to have town hall meetings all across the country where members of Clinton's Blue Ribbon Committee, chaired by the late historian John Hope Franklin, a path-breaking historian of many, for many reasons, but most famously for breaking so many color lines. It's Black historian. You have these town hall meetings across the country to talk about our current conversation about race. A lot of really smart people on this committee seemed like a moment of real promise. And the moment kind of implodes right away when the Commission comes together to sort of organize itself. And Angela Oh, a Korean attorney in Los Angeles, a tremendously strong record when it comes to civil rights law. She clashes immediately with John Hope Franklin. It's an incredibly strong record on civil rights activism and scholarship. And the clash was about how, in 1997-98, should America talk about race? Franklin was saying, you must start with slavery. Everything comes from that, that everything, every kind of conversation comes with that. Angela Oh says, you start from slavery, you are eliminating from the conversation millions, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and people from other different parts of the world who don't have part of that experience. And in so many ways they're both exactly right. So how do you resolve this? Well it turns out you don't. The Commission effectively becomes a dead letter, have a few conversations, nothing much comes of it. Clinton's philandering his denial and his impeachment serves as a profound distraction and sinks his second term. So the conversation becomes a muted conversation, muted by the impeachment trial if nothing else. Clinton's impeachment trial was not the only important court case in the 90s and I want to spend what time I have left talking about some of these court cases because it brings us really, it brings us to a campus and it brings us to our fairly current moment. I want to talk about four court cases, three from the 1990s and one from 2003. Most of them are Supreme Court cases, not all of them though. The first one is Shaw v. Reno, v. Reno against the Attorney General of the United States, Janet Reno. And it involved redistricting in North Carolina, congressional districts. The federal government required North Carolina, the state, the legislature to create another district that would guarantee a black majority. North Carolina is not an unusual southern state with large black populations but also clustered black populations. And it was unusual among southern states in that the districts were set up in such a way that the district was watered down, thinned out. And the federal government says North Carolina, you need to get your act together, you need to create another district that will have, create the chance to elect a black person in an office, put a black person in an office, we need a black majority district. And it would be the new twelfth district in North Carolina. The district was formed and then a suit was brought by those who felt the district was a result of racial gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, a place in support of an African American political presence. Racial gerrymandering had always been trying to eliminate a black political presence and talking about black-white issues. Now, there are several key issues that come up in the decision in Chave Reno. It was decided in 1993. One key issue is that race is now a suspect category. You know, there was a slide a little while ago, because I left it a little bit too early in Baki. Actually, let me just, one point I forgot to mention, it's very important right now. Quotas cannot be considered in application, but race can be considered as one of the key factors in admissions. So Baki's point of things Baki does, it says we can think about race when it comes to sort of adjudicating the limits, the parameters of racial belonging. Just keep that fact in mind. In Chave Reno, Supreme Court says race is a suspect category. We've come a long way since the challenges of the 1960s, and we need to think a little more carefully about when race is used. The Voting Rights Act says that people had to consider issues of race when setting up jurisdictions, and Shaw says you just can't. So Shaw starts to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. And it comes out with a resolution, that race cannot be the predominant factor in deciding something like voting districts, but it can be considered. So this is something in line with Baki, but a little bit different. Race can be considered, but it can't be the predominant factor. It is a suspect category. And this is the most important phrase. There must be a compelling government interest to justify considering race. So Shaw of Reno is really asking, how do we take race into consideration when we're setting up public policy? Challenges of Voting Rights Act is 65, so it's chipping away at part of it. There must be a compelling government interest. Now this is the twelfth district. I'm going to show you in a second. And I'll confess, I remember there was a recent resolution this last year about, it came back again. I confess I don't even recall what the decision was, but in 93 this is what people were fighting against, the twelfth district. That little thing? Certainly a suspect shape. I mean districts are always weird looking anyway, following rivers or sort of census tracks. District twelve, and it's actually thicker here on the map than it is in reality with the proposal. Sometimes it just ran along the highway. There's no people living on the highway. So we'd go from one black neighborhood to another black neighborhood. Now the supposition, of course, is that black folks will vote for black people. And that's something you can talk about in your discussion section. That's a whole other kind of thorny, briar patch of presumptions. So North Carolina's proposed twelfth congressional district. It certainly looks awfully strange. Going forward, 1995, Adirond v. Pena. It's a case in Colorado. Adirond Construction v. Pena, who's the Secretary of Transportation, excuse me. Up to this point, federal agencies had given financial incentives to those contractors who hire minority-controlled subcontractors. So if you want to build something in Europe, you're certainly a contractor. I get a bonus if I start looking for minority-owned firms to help do some of the work that I'm supporting. And in this particular case, Adirond, a white-owned construction firm, submitted the lowest bid on a contract for a highway but did not get the contract. The contract went instead to minority-owned firm. So the Supreme Court holds, the Supreme Court holds that race can only be used if there's a compelling interest that builds off of Shavi Reno. And then that the government agency using racial distribution must do so under strict scrutiny. Another one of these great Supreme Court phrases, and it must be used in a narrowly tailored way, compelling interest, strict scrutiny, narrowly tailored. What you have in Adirond v. Pena is, again, a narrowing of the option to use race. You've got to have an incredibly strong case if you're going to press a, quote, racial issue and hope to have it succeed. 1996, state of Texas. This is not a Supreme Court case. In Hopwood v. Texas, the University of Texas Law School had been aiming, tradition of aiming to admit a class that looked like Texas. And it actually changes the mission's formula to benefit black and Latino applicants. Cheryl Hopwood, the plaintiff, is one of four people, Wal-White, who were denied admission and then sued. The district court sides with the University of Texas saying they can set their own admissions policy. They haven't offended the logic that was announced in Bakke. The appeals court took the plaintiff side. And in Hopwood, it says, race cannot be used as a plus factor in the consideration of applications. So Texas didn't use quotas. That's unconstitutional. Can't do it. But it did say, you know, I'm making up the numbers in the schematic. If 100 points is what you need to get admitted to the University of Texas Law School, if you're African-American, we're going to give you 10 more points. That helps boost your score. And this is actually a practice used by many universities across the country. I know it's used by the University of California that gave a bump up to those from historically unrepresentative groups. It also gave a bump up for veterans and it gave a bump up for other populations as well. But it was racial and ethnic minorities who become the focus of this excess. So if you take Bakke as the foundation, you add Chavez-Rena, you take Adiron v. Payne, you take Hopwood v. Texas, you have a situation where the very premise of Bakke, which eliminated quotas but said race could be used. So it supported affirmative action. The premise of Bakke is being stripped away. The Voting Rights Act is being narrowed in terms of how it can be applied. And now sort of ground zero for the debate is university admissions policies. This is why the stakes were so high in 2003 at the University of Michigan. In 1997, in 1997 Barbara Gruder had applied to the University of Michigan Law School and been denied admission. The law school freely admitted that it used race and its admission as a compelling interest to achieve diversity. It used that word that they knew was, I mean, law school, compelling interest is actually that would survive a litmus test. So they felt. So the question was, does the University of Michigan Law School did its use of preferences in student admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? These were the questions before the court. Now I said in 1997, I'm going to turn around until the court decides it in 2003. The lead up to the Supreme Court decision was really quite fascinating. Because it tells a story of our contemporary political and capital corporate culture as it comes to affirmative action. You have friends of the court, petitions being followed by a whole bunch of people. And you have a really fascinating coalition being formed by corporate interests and retired military generals. That if one takes the stereotype in mind and thinks these are very conservative populations, these are the groups that were very much in favor of university admissions admissions policy, very much in favor of affirmative action. The military actually being one of the great place for diversifying management structures, not saying it's perfect, no place is, the military had done more than many other institutions to diversify itself over the course of the previous 40 years. And corporations recognizing, if you go back to Jesse Jackson and his Operation Push and his boycotts of companies like Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, corporations recognizing we need to have a pool of talent that we can tap into for management positions. So we can tap into markets and make more money. This is what the corporations are trying to do, of course. We need to preserve affirmative action policies as long as there aren't quotas wherever we can find them. George Bush White House comes out in support of the plaintiffs. Supreme Court weighs in and it has a mixed answer. People didn't know what was going to happen. The mixed answer is that student body diversity is a compelling state of interest in the context of university admissions. It's compelling. Race can therefore be a factor in consideration of the application, as long as its use is narrowly tailored. You see it's building on the language of the court cases I was already talking about. It reaffirms, therefore, Grutter v. Bollinger, reaffirms Baki, maintains a narrow framework to understand Baki. Then Sandra Day O'Connor says it does something rather unusual that she's since distanced herself from. She goes, you know, we need this now. One of the issues with conservatism, this is something that I just drew a blank on his name. It doesn't really matter. This is an ideology that many conservatives are saying, look, it's been 30 and 40 years since the Civil Rights Movement. That's enough time. Liberals would say, what about the previous 200? Anyway, Sandra Day O'Connor says, yeah, we've come a long way, but we're still not perfect as a society in this issue, in 25 years. Think about 25 years is about right. How's it going with the number? I have no idea. But in 25 years, there will probably be time to revisit this question. And you can bet. Well, before 25 years is up, I'm sure. But if by some miracle, it's not challenged within 25 years, you better believe that there will be a 25th anniversary of suits against affirmative action and college admissions and wherever else it's articulated. So the University of Michigan Law School had actually scrapped its policy. University of Michigan had a slightly different policy that supported affirmative action as student population was able to keep it. Now, collectively, these cases demonstrate how race works in a legal setting since the Civil Rights Triumphs of the 1960s. Something interesting has happened in these cases, though. In each of these cases, white plaintiffs were the ones who were filing suit, claiming their equal rights had been violated. This is sort of the fascinating turn in civil rights law, equal protection law, in the 90s, in the 80s into the 90s. Something I was encouraged, by the way, by Clarence Thomas, when he was the head of the EEOC that became an organization that was put there by Ronald Reagan, and it was an organization that actually ended up becoming non-functioning as far as supporting claims for racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination and gender discrimination. Backlogged in tens of thousands of cases. But we're in a moment in the 1990s where the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment that was used often to great effect for civil rights advocates over, especially the height of the movement in the 50s and 60s, has now much narrower application and is used with greater success to roll back some of the more controversial gains of the civil rights movement. So in a sense, the civil rights laws are being used against the policies promulgated by civil rights activism. You get into the 1990s. All of this begs the question is how race is used in our society. This will really be the topic of the final lecture, but it's important to understand the passions. I mean, I've been talking about them in sort of a clinical way that you see in Supreme Court cases, federal court cases, the last 20 or 30 minutes, but the passion of how people use and abuse race hasn't diminished in the wake of the civil rights victories in the 1960s with the civil rights excesses, again, based on your politics. In the 1970s, for instance, in Boston, I already talked about the Stuart case in Boston, the 90s, but Boston has nasty history when it comes to racial and ethnic politics. White ethnic communities in Boston are up in arms. There's a new policy about busing that we're going to take black kids in Boston that's a highly segregated city and bring them into, quote, our schools and ship our kids out to black schools. This is an atrocity. We have gangs of angry white ethnic Bostonians attacking school buses with children in them, hurling epithets left and right, and acting in the most disturbing kinds of ways. When you think about the politics of racial symbolism and citizenship, I mean, these are some of the core themes with which I began this course. Theodore Landsmark, an African-American man, from Yale, with a JD in 1973, a degree in architecture in 1976, up in Boston. He's walking out of City Hall, a well-dressed man, three-piece suit, very professional, at least until recently. He still may be the president of an arts university in Boston. He steps out into the City Hall Plaza unaware that there is a mob of these angry white ethnic individuals upset about busing policies. He's not an activist as far as busing is concerned. He's not one of the people on the front lines calling for change, but he is black. And that's all that mattered to the person who approached him and expressed his idea about citizenship upon or rather in Landsmark, taking the American flag with a fixed point and goring Landsmark. He survives, he survives. But if you're thinking that the politics of citizenship and belonging and of racial symbolism, wrapped up in this case just a black man walking out of City Hall, if you think those are politics of a different era, going back prior to the sixties and fifties and earlier, this is 1970s, and if you think it's only a politics of the 1970s, I think in the last lecture we'll see that it's a problem very much with us in our post-racial age. Thank you very much.