Via Rick Perlstein (who I shared the stage with on the framing panel at this year's Yearly Kos Convention), check out this essay by author Nancy MacLean at the History News Network: The Scary Origins of Chief Justice John Roberts Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration. The essay outlines just how old segregationists began to adopt the language of the civil rights movement to oppose civil rights reform. It's in this twisting of the language that we can find the seeds of Roberts' recent decision in the Seattle and Louisville school cases.
But their core commitments stayed the same.
To fight social justice, conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art
of rhetorical jujitsu. They seized the civil rights movement’s greatest
strength--its moral power–to defeat its goals. They complained less and
less that civil rights measures violated property rights, aided
communists or elevated racial inferiors. Instead, conservatives claimed
that civil rights measures themselves discriminated.“I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic
than the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered
phraseology. “If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex,”
intoned the outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it is wrong
to discriminate by reason of race or sex.”The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true
advocates of fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s
words, as “worse racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern
bigots.” Color blindness, conservatives had come to see, offered the
most promising strategy to defeat the push for equality.Stealing civil rights language for rhetorical jujitsu attacks on the
civil rights movement was a calculated strategy. In its 1981 Mandate
for Leadership for the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation
explained: “For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil
rights field has been for control of language,” particularly words such
as “equality” and “opportunity.” “The secret to victory, whether in
court or in congress,” it advised, “has been to control the definition
of these terms.”
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