Globalisation and Affirmative Action

Speaking for the majority in the Law School case, Justice Sandra O’Connor did not just validate the tenuous position of Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke case (which served as the thin reed upon which racial/ethnic preferences in educational admissions were based for the last 25 years). She greatly strengthened Powell’s position – both by articulating forcefully the rationale for educational institutions to take account of race and ethnicity, and by replacing Powell’s lone voice in 1978 with a court majority in 2003. The fact that a larger majority of the court (including O’Connor) decided against the procedure used to favour under-represented minority applicants to Michigan’s undergraduate colleges does little

In the context of a concerted assault on US affirmative action policies that began more than 10 years ago, and the current dominance of the right-wing in political discourse and action in the US, this Supreme Court stance is certainly surprising. Few people would have expected a rightward drifting court, which selected George Bush II as the winner of the closely contested 2000 presidential election, to endorse so firmly a left-leaning policy like racial/ethnic preferences – one that challenges in many ways the US constitution and that arguably does not enjoy the support of the majority of the American people. How can this remarkable outcome be explained?

Globalisation has thus weakened support for reservations policies among India’s powers-that-be. Yet precisely because globalisation brings India more closely into the US orbit, the US Supreme Court judgment in favour of preferential policies will no doubt reverberate throughout India – something from which Indian advocates of such policies can take heart.

Some members of the pro-AA coalition (especially the educators) are genuinely committed to the group-egalitarian goals that affirmative action policies can help to promote. But what unites most coalition members into a politically powerful partnership is the understanding that the US cannot expect to prevail in the heightened competition of an increasingly globalised multicultural world if its leadership remains predominantly and visibly white. As so many CEOs, generals and politicians in the US have come to

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