Integration , Affirmative Action , and Strict Scrutiny

This Article defends racial integration as a central goal of race-based affirmative action. Racial integration of mainstream institutions is necessary both to dismantle the current barriers to opportunity suffered by disadvantaged racial groups, and to create a democratic civil society. Integration, conceived as a forward-looking remedy for de facto racial segregation and discrimination, makes better sense of the actual practice of affirmative action than backward-looking compensatory rationales, which offer restitution for past discrimination, and diversity rationales, which claim to promote nonremedial educational goals. Integrative rationales for affirmative action in higher education also could easily pass equal protection analysis, if only the point of strict scrutiny of racial classifications were understood. Unfortunately, the development of strict scrutiny as an analytical tool has been hampered by the Court's confusion over the kinds of constitutional harm threatened by state uses of racial classification. This Article sorts out these alleged harms and shows how strict scrutiny should deal with them. It shows how narrow-tailoring tests constitute powerful tools for putting many allegations of constitutional harm from racebased affirmative action to rest, and for putting the remainder into perspective. It also argues that there is no constitutional or moral basis for prohibiting state uses of racial means to remedy private-sector discrimination. Integrative affirmative action programs in educational contexts, which aim to remedy private-sector discrimination, can therefore meet the requirements of strict scrutiny, properly interpreted.