The Anti-Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action As Wedge and Weapon

In this deeply researched and powerfully written exposÉ, Mike Steve Collins pulls back the curtain on the networks of power and influence that are pulling the strings to undo progress toward a more just and equitable society. The efforts of this anti–civil rights movement, as Collins calls it, most recently came to a head on June 23, 2023, when the US Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in higher education and opened the door to even more regressive policies, laws, and bans. The ruling was the fulfillment of a decades-long battle by right-wing activists and their networks to divide the country.

As Collins sees it, American society is trapped in a style of thinking and decision-making that makes bad choices seem rational. Called a prisoner’s dilemma by game theorists and a hermeneutic trap by Collins, this way of thinking has led to policy choices that make everyone worse off, in part by creating hostility between communities that could productively work together and form powerful coalitions. The work of the anti–civil rights movement, led by figures such as Edward Blum and Christopher Rufo, has repeatedly found ways to undermine the shared interests of the American people by splitting coalitions and pitting marginalized groups against each other even while claiming and perhaps feeling the highest of motives. From racial segregation in the 1960s to the modern boogeyman of critical race theory, conservative elites have wielded cultural and political wedges to expand their power to set the political, educational, and legal agenda.

Affirmative action has long been a weapon of choice in conservatives’ arsenal against social progress, and few have leveraged it as successfully—and detrimentally—as Edward Blum. In 2014, the year after he helped gut the affirmative action aspect of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Blum created Students for Fair Admissions and brought a suit against Harvard University for discriminating against Asian Americans. A decade later, this latest effort in a long string of traps and dilemmas became the Supreme Court case that upended affirmative action.

Collins’s groundbreaking work is a field guide to the personalities, funding, and dilemmas that characterize the ongoing war between the civil rights movement and the anti–civil rights movement—between the forces represented by figures such as Thurgood Marshall, a hero of the civil rights movement, and his replacement on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, a hero of the anti–civil rights movement. This book will help readers better understand the battles that have been fought in the past, where the next fight might take place, and what will be necessary in order to win.

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Hug-gate and Other Hermeneutic Traps
• Part I: The Last Days of the Civil Rights Era
• 1. Running Thurgood Ragged

• 2. The Search for Deep Equality
• 3. The Rise of Chinese Affirmative Action
• 4. The Coalition Splits
• 5. Backlash Inc.
• 6. Bakke: The Making of a Dagger
• 7. The Stipulation
• 8. Certiorari
• 9. The Contest inside the Court
• 10. The American Mind after Bakke

• Part II. Triumph of the Anti–Civil Rights Movement
• 11. The Equality Matrix

• 12. Sea Change
• 13. Reagan Justice
• 14. Originalism from Strom Thurmond to Edwin Meese
• 15. World Making, Originalist Style
• 16. Clint Bolick Goes to War
• 17. The 10 Percent Solution
• 18. Proposition 209
• 19. Enter Edward Blum
• 20. Conservative Three-Card Monte
• 21. The Center for Individual Rights versus the University of Michigan
• 22. The Meaning of 20 Points
• 23. Shanta Driver Takes on the Anti-Civil Rights Movement
• 24. Blum Takes Over

• Conclusion: The Cyclops’ Vengeance
• Notes
• Index

"The Anti–Civil Rights Movement: Affirmative Action as Wedge and Weapon follows the rise, expansion, and triumph of what Michael S. Collins calls ‘the anti–civil rights movement’ or, seen from my perspective, the construction of the hegemonic force now overthrowing affirmative action and more broadly endeavoring to outlaw any legal and civil awareness of racism in the United States. Detailing the leaders, foot-soldiers, advocacy groups, and funders, this book shows how the rather nasty sausage has been made behind the scenes and out in the open. Readers who haven’t delved into the history will be shocked by the human, informational, and financial resources poured into this retrograde project. But as a scholar who has recounted some of this history, I found myself physically nauseated by the disgusting language used by conservatives to depict Black Americans. Why are we blasted with so much raw hatred on race and now on other issues? What can be done to shift the discourse to compassionate problem-solving?"—Ellen Messer-Davidow, author of The Making of Reverse Discrimination: How DeFunis and Bakke Bleached Racism from Equal Protection