Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

A Changing Political Context:
Introduction to the Pinderhughes,
Yarborough Report
As with the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision of 1978 1 that prohibited “taking
race into account as a factor in ... admissions decisions”on the grounds
that“quotas”had denied entrance to a White male, November 1996 ushered
in another major shift in public policy. California passed Proposition 209
which constricted attempts to reverse years of segregation through affirmative
action.“Prop 209,”as it was called, prohibited“state, local governments,
districts, public universities, colleges, and schools and other government instrumentalities
from discriminating against or giving preferential treatment
to any individual or group in public employment, public education or
public contracting on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
2 That same year the Fifth District Federal Court in Texas handed down
the Hopwood decision banning the affirmative action program at the University
of Texas Law School (which did not admit Black students until
1950). The next year Black enrollment dropped more than 90 percent. Mexican
American enrollment dropped approximately 60 percent. 3
It is in the context of these times that, in 1998, program officer Janice
Petrovich commissioned the foundation’s fourth report on African American
Studies. Political scientist Dianne Pinderhughes of the University of
Illinois, Urbana Champaign, and literary scholar RichardYarborough of the
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