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Support for Affirmative Action Hits Record Low

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"Right now, I feel like it's reverse discrimination," said one poll respondent, a white, 69-year-old retired teacher from Rhode Island, who was interviewed for this story and did not wish to be identified. "I did support it at first, but, gradually, because of this reverse discrimination it's gone too far."

By the fast-approaching end of its term, the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision in a case determining whether the University of Texas admissions program violated the Constitution by using racial preferences. It's the latest of a handful of cases the court has taken on dealing with affirmative action over the past two decades.



By September 1995—coinciding with the Republican takeover of the House and the welfare-reform debate of the 1990s—the number of Americans supporting affirmative action dropped to 49 percent, with 43 percent opposing it.

That's essentially where the number stood through 2010, with a brief uptick in 2000, until this June's survey. It's a change some think is attributable, in part, to the re-election of President Barack Obama.

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"On the surface, things are very positive," said Weldon Latham, a Washington-based attorney, who is black and advises corporations on diversity issues.


Kevin Brown, a law professor at Indiana University, also spoke to the possible "Obama effect."

"Certainly, the election of Barack Obama as president has made a difference," Brown said. "I did not believe America would elect a black president in my lifetime. There's no question America is a much more tolerant, open society than 20, 25 years ago."


Brown has written about the "Underrepresentation of Ascendant Blacks at Selective Educational Institutions." In other words, that American black descendants of slaves are increasingly making up fewer of those benefiting from affirmative action. Instead, he says, immigrant blacks from the Caribbean and Africa are making up bigger percentages of the blacks getting preference for elite colleges.

"In some places," Brown said, "if you go to your elite Ivy League schools, you're finding very few of your traditional African-Americans. They're maybe about one-third of blacks in those schools. Unlike the president, who grew up in the U.S., you're coming up with a lot of black immigrants. Frankly, the U.S. civil-rights struggle is not their struggle."

And even when it comes to Obama—to Latham's point of there being more black leaders like the president, former Secretary of State Powell, and Attorney General Eric Holder—Brown said, "Can I just point out—Kenyan, Caribbean, Caribbean."

There have also been campaigns against affirmative-action programs in the states over the last 20 years led by former University of California Regent Ward Connerly, points out Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociology professor at Princeton and co-author of "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal."

"In a broader context," Espenshade noted, "it is the case that an increasing number of states have done away with race considerations in public education or public employment either because of constitutional amendments or gubernatorial action."

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Affirmative action has been banned in eight states—Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Washington.


"The decline in support for affirmative action based on race is not surprising, as the growing divide between rich and poor has become more important to an individual's life chances than the differences between being white and black," Kahlenberg said in an email.


But Brown said he believes that "misses the point."

"It's not that people don't have obstacles to overcome because of low socioeconomic status," Brown said, "but race provides a different set of obstacles than socioeconomic status. It's not an either-or. It's really both."

By Domenico Montanaro of NBC News