GREENVILLE - Once upon a time in my America, there was the good old-fashioned achievement ethic of a just reward for effort extended.
Certainly there was a badly skewed performance field, especially if one's skin reflected a darker hue. Nevertheless, some determined people of color managed to traverse its subjugated obstacles.
But for those who found themselves hopelessly trapped in mediocrity by bigotry and institutional racism, the federal government, through executive order, created affirmative action in 1965 as an industrial and academic enhancement.
Let's not get the idea that affirmative action was created solely to level the performance field - because there was a lot of white guilt at play. The nation was facing growing racial angst fueled by a growing unrest in urban centers.
As those urban hot spots exploded, the media found itself hamstrung in covering the breaking story, because few mainstream print and broadcast outlets had black journalists on their editorial staffs.
So 38 years ago, affirmative action made perfect sense from a business standpoint, because commerce was cutting itself out of a sizable market since the work force did not reflect the human mosaic of those communities.
Now affirmative action should be put out to pasture like yesterday's stale headlines, because it has satisfied its mission of diversity and inclusion. What was given now has to be earned.
Affirmative action was never intended to be another government entitlement for blacks, yet that is exactly what the liberals and civil rights organization have made it out to be.
The battleground - not the one in Iraq - has been staked around a dual admissions policy at the University of Michigan and its law school.
At the law school, so-called special preferences have been afforded to minority students since 1992. Then two white female students - one rejected at the law school and the other at the university's undergraduate college - sued, alleging that their exclusion was unconstitutional. The Bush administration agreed and joined the lawsuit.
The Michigan admissions policy gives 20 points - out of 180 points - for ethnicity. Although diversity is beneficial to any social landscape, in college it comes down to satisfying individual prerequisites for academic performance. I don't see being a specific hue as a necessary performance variable.
On April 1, when much of the nation was preoccupied with "Iraqi Freedom," the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court heard two hours of oral arguments, which is going a long way in determining whether people stand on their own academic merit or be forever wedded to artificial - and racially unfair - government-supported entitlements.
In listening to the taped replay on C-SPAN over the weekend, I found the spirited judicial repartee between the justices and the litigants absolutely invigorating.
From my vantage point, the affirmative action scheme that we know is going to undergo a radical change, if not outrightly be ruled unconstitutional.
In 1978 in the landmark Bakke case, a divided high court ruled that racial quotas were unconstitutional, but waffled on the issue of race as being one of many "plus" factors in college admissions.
Now in the Michigan case, Justice Antonin Scalia cut right to the heart of the matter when he noted that the University of Michigan had created "an elite law school" and now wanted to advance the diversity quotient in disguising its admissions policy.
"Now, having created this situation by making that decision," Scalia said, "it then turns around and says, 'Oh, we have a compelling state interest in eliminating this racial imbalance that we ourselves have created.'"
Scalia had a simple solution to the issue, and he offered from the bench: "If Michigan really cares enough about that racial imbalance, why doesn't it do as many other state law schools do? Lower the standards, and not have a flagship elite law school."
And that is exactly what time it is, and the University of Michigan wants the Supreme Court to bail it out by ruling that it is constitutionally acceptable to discriminate if diversity is the ultimate goal, which is nothing but legal subterfuge.
Lost in the liberal distortions is the objective of earning one's way, because what affirmative action has been remanufactured into is reversing bias to the detriment of those it was created to help.
