ABSTRACT
The 1996 Hopwood v. Texas decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans had at the time halted affirmative action practices for all jurisdictions under the Firth Circuit, which included the state of Texas. Affirmative action talk in grade school or college classrooms is fraught with stereotyped caricatures of so-called ‘undeserving’ minorities and white and Asian victims of reverse discrimination in a zero-sum game. If affirmative action conversations start with these points of departures, we have utterly failed as educators to properly provide students with even a kernel of historical truth pertaining to Civil Rights, racism, and the necessity for affirmative action. In law, Brown’s significance is no longer hallowed, but hollowed—reduced to little more than a symbolic footnote of history. Democratic affirmative action policies in and beyond education have all been defeated, or at least severely stripped of any consequential mechanism for meaningful impact.
