Civil Rights Under Reagan.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

Civil Rights Under Reagan

Detlefsen's concise and provocative study makes a strong case that, for all its sound and fury, the Reagan administration barely altered affirmative action as it is practiced in corporations, universities, or even in the federal government.

During the 1980s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continued to file discrimination cases, much as it ever did. The Office of Be eral Contract Compliance continued to demand that federal contractors submit affirmative action plans. And the Education Department's mammoth Office of Civil Rights pretty much stayed as liberal as ever. In one of Detlefsen's many telling examples, he shows how, even as late as Reagan's second term, the Office of Civil Rights was engaging in decidedly un-Reaganesque policies--like filing a complaint against the University of California at Berkeley, of all places, for having "sexist" language in its course catalog.

It's a paradox. Why didn't this conservative administration make more headway, especially since p olls show Americans leer of and even hostile towards affirmative action? Detlefsen, a political scientist who is sympathetic to the administration's self-styled "color-blind" philosophy, cites the familiar tendencies of bureaucracies to stay the course no matter who is at the helm. Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds tried to steer his Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in a new direction. But career attorneys, Detlefsen reports, would openly cheer when Reynolds, as he so often did, lost cases, Detlefsen, though, thinks he's found another explanation for the Reagan administration's failure. The culprit: a doctrinaire, liberal "civil rights ideology" that runs Washington.

To be generous, there is some truth in this neoconservative broadside. There are a lot of liberals, and even Republicans, in positions of power who reflexively support anything called "civil rights"--even when it goes far beyond nondiscrimination to include dubious policies like racial preferences for Asian-Indians. But if the Reagan administration fell on its face, don't blame some liberal bogyman. After all, the Reagan administration steamroled liberals on everything from defense spending to deregulation. No, it failed on civil rights because even people who are wary of affirmative action couldn't trust this administration to do the right thing. Never did it offer the necessary reassurance that it reaslly cared about the plight of...