Board Votes and Ballot Initiatives: Racial Political Strategy in Challenges to Affirmative Action and Open Admissions

• In Event: 3511 - Race, Higher Education and Myths of Affirmative Action

Abstract

Literature on social movements and political mobilization often centers the actions of grassroots or less powerful groups that challenge political and economic elites. This scholarly treatment sometimes overlooks how elites tactically organize to accomplish their own goals. Using organizational, historical, legislative, and media sources, this paper documents how conservatives projected colorblind and meritocratic ideals in their internal challenges (via university boards of trustees) and external challenges (via ballot propositions) to affirmative action and open admissions in California, Michigan, and New York. Conservatives utilized a racial preferences racial political strategy in their efforts to eliminate affirmative action, and an inferiority race-and-class strategy in their struggle against open admissions; these racial political strategies respond to the different institutional status and reputation of the universities. This paper also argues that the failure of rearticulation in anti-affirmative action campaigns contributed to campaign defeat in Colorado and Missouri.. This paper provides insight on how The Right propels racial formation in the post-civil rights period. This paper also complicates understandings of elite mobilization through analysis of why elite challengers succeed and fail.

Author

• Amaka Camille Okechukwu, George Mason University