Attacking affirmative action: William Bennett's post-racial fiction in defense of whiteness as property

During the late 1970s, US conservatives launched concerted attacks against affirmative action, defaming the policy as “reverse racism”. As chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William J. Bennett led these campaigns. In a well-publicized skirmish with Clarence Thomas, then head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Bennett made his case against affirmative action. Neither man supported affirmative action and while they seemed to advocate for “colorblindness” in hiring and college admissions, they eroded institutions created to protect civil rights. This article understands conservatives’ resistance to affirmative action as a strategy to defend their “property interest in whiteness”. Legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris has theorized “whiteness as property” against the backdrop of debates over affirmative action in the 1990s and her concept allows for an analysis of how conservatives opposed affirmative action and undermined civil rights, a dynamic that is still unfolding today.