Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) is a misnomer. It is deliberately misleading so as to hijack the spirit of civil rights movement by naming itself similarly. At its best, it’s a right wing effort (funded by businessmen like Ward Connerly) to sabotage the ongoing demands to implement affirmative action more proactively. At its worst, it’s a highly reactionary movement aimed at systematically promote discrimination at workplaces.

This fall, Michigan voters are going to decide on the fate of use of affirmative action policies in the state. It’s especially alarming because the MCRI is proposing to outlaw race, gender and other personal demographic data as criteria for public institutions including Michigan's public universities to use in furtherance of civil rights initiative. Only in 1997, University of Michigan spearheaded the movement of affirmative action to be applicable in colleges, but over the last many years, continues to be the prime target.

The irony is that MCRI is not a new initiative by the right-wingers. Indeed, President Bush has echoed similar sentiments before. On January 15, 2003, the President said,

"..the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race. So, tomorrow my administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race, and establishes numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional."

However, after a week, the President’s pleas also did not bear fruits for the reactionaries. In its first ruling on affirmative action in higher education admissions in 25 years, the Supreme Court justices voted 5-4 to uphold the University of Michigan's law school affirmative action policy by ruling that race can indeed be used in university admission decisions.

Detroit Free Press today runs two columns to provide voice to both schools of thoughts. Whereas Roger Clegg finds Affirmative Action an ambiguous term to deal with, Paul Hillegonds says we will roll back to the 60’s again if reactionaries had their way.