When many liberals opposed affirmative action

Young people may assume that the affirmative action controversy has always involved liberals versus conservatives. In fact, many liberals once believed that the best way to end racism was for both government and society to be color-blind.

An example of liberal opposition to affirmative action is the following excerpt from Justice Stanley Mosk's 1976 California Supreme Court majority opinion in Bakke v. Regents of the University of California:

"To uphold the University would call for the sacrifice of principle for the sake of dubious expediency and would represent a retreat in the struggle to assure that each man and woman shall be judged on the basis of individual merit alone, a struggle which has only lately achieved success in removing legal barriers to racial equality. . . . "

Another liberal who criticized affirmative action was U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, as illustrated in the following excerpts from his dissent in the 1974 decision of DeFunis v. Odegard:

"The reservation of a proportion of the law school class for members of selected minority groups is fraught with similar dangers, for one must immediately determine which groups are to receive such favored treatment and which are to be excluded, the proportions of the class that are to be allocated to each, and even the criteria by which to determine whether an individual is a member of a favored group. There is no assurance that a common agreement can be reached, and first the schools and then the courts will be buffeted with the competing claims. ... The Equal Protection Clause commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized. ... "

Both California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas were two prominent liberal jurists who opposed affirmative action.