KELLIS E. PARKER KEYNOTE ADDRESS[dagger]

St. John's Law Review, Fall 2003 by Meeks, Gregory W

Many African Americans have attained unprecedented prosperity and status in our time. There are more African American billionaires, multimillionaires, and millionaires than ever before.10 There is a sizeable and growing African American middle class.11 The African American community has spending power greater than whole nations and groups of nations. African American buying power was projected to rise from $308 billion in 1990 to $533 billion in 1999, which was a larger projected percentage increase than that of the total buying power.12 There are African Amercian CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, including American Express, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, AOL Time Warner, and General Electric.13 African Americans head major universities. There is even an African American Secretary of State and an African American National Security Adviser. Nonetheless, the implications of the legacy Franklin Raines described at Howard University are inescapable.

Despite enormous and undeniable progress, the situation facing a great number of African Americans and Latinos is tenuous at best. African Americans and Latinos are found in disproportionately high numbers among the poor, among the poor in health, among those without health care insurance, among the poorly educated, and among the incarcerated.

Add to that the effects of an administration whose policy favors the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Add to that an administration that opposes the race plus standard set forth in the Bakke decision and judging from the oral argument of his Solicitor General, a President who believes that race should not be a consideration in any area of public policy or governance.

In effect, this amounts to an admission by the administration that we got to where we are today with whites being allowed to drive while African Americans were forced to walk. Although in its argument in Grutter and Grate, the administration says diversity is a good thing and equal opportunity ought to be guaranteed, it nonetheless maintains that it should be unconstitutional for public or private entities to provide African Americans and Latinos with cars to help them get to the next destination at approximately the same time and pace as whites.14 So, while whites continue to go forward in automobiles, African Americans and other people of color will just have to walk or run as fast as possible to make whatever progress they can.

Add to that specter that the fate of affirmative action is in the hands, hearts, and heads of a justice like Antonin Scalia, who responded to the lawyer representing the University of Michigan that if its law school wanted to admit more minorities it could have chosen not to create an elite law school rather than create a program to enhance the admission of minorities to an elite law school.15 This was said despite the abundance of evidence that a disproportionate number of United States presidents, senators, representatives, and corporate leaders come from the nation's elite law schools.16