Post-civil-rights conservatism reframed anti-discrimination remedies as reverse racism

Evidence

In the 1970s, newly emergent “conservatives,” as they self-identified, broke from the liberal past/future refrain that the nation still had a ways to go. They pointed to the legislative gains of the preceding decades to claim that the nation had arrived; Black people in the here and now were no longer facing racism. Conservatives framed supporters of affirmative action as “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination” against white people, as Yale Law professor Robert Bork claimed in 1978.65 Such arguments echoed the Supreme Court ruling in 1883 that found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, gutting the anti-racist protections of the Reconstruction amendments on the grounds that Black Americans should not be treated as “the special favorite.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1287

Categorization

• XREF: Direct parallel to the 1883 Supreme Court gutting of the Civil Rights Act — a recurring structural echo the reader’s case study (origin dating shaping deviation-vs-design) would want linked. — connects to: Christian conservatives now justify discrimination via rights language rather than morality — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 292; The Civil Rights Act empowered white resistance by legitimizing anti-government conservatism. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 467; Desegregation pressure forced white southerners to reinvent racism as color-blind rights conservatism — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 25