Julian was truly a man of letters and activism. His speeches almost made me giddy with delight as he used language to propel his ideas and visions.

Julian also spoke at the NAACP Madison Branch’s Freedom Fund Banquet and I had the honor of interviewing him in the car that was transporting him from the Dane County Regional Airport to the Marriott Hotel West in Madison. And he so eloquently put Affirmative Action — and the fight to end it — into perspective.

He basically said, ‘The fight against Affirmative Action is like the football game where one team owns the stadium and employs the referees and begins each game ahead 20-0. And now they want to say that everything is even, that we should start a new day where ‘everyone is equal.’”

In other words, Julien was telling us that the United States has been race-biased in its institutions and policies for well over 200 years and now Euro-Americans are saying everyone is equal and therefore we can’t have things like Affirmative Action because the U.S. Constitution forbids discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, etc. Funny you don’t hear about people saying that the ill-gotten gains of 400 years of slavery and oppression have to be given back because it was against the Constitution.

Amendments to the U.S. Constitution meant to free the Africans who were slaves were now being used to freeze them into a new form of neo-slavery. Conservatives were using the weapons of civil rights against the beneficiaries of civil rights.

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race in admissions to colleges and universities. While many of us were expecting this ruling, it was still a shock when it actually happened. And an enduring symbolic image in my mind was of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas slamming the door of opportunity closed on millions of students of color as he smugly dwelled in the illusion that he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, suppressing the fact that his millionaire buddies have been footing the housing bill for Thomas’ mother for over a decade and spent lavishly on him during foreign junkets — excuse me foreign vacations.

And let’s not fool ourselves. The minority government of the Wisconsin legislature — Euro-American dominated legislature — has been trying to end DEI programs at Wisconsin’s public universities and hate videos of Euro-American university students — videos not based on facts or reality — go unchallenged by the university.

The BLK PWR Coalition stated last May that Black students comprise 2 percent of UW-Madison’s student population — with many of them being on athletic scholarships — even though Blacks make up 6.8 percent of Wisconsin’s population. What is going to happen with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in higher education? Let UCLA’s experience be a guide.

“Despite UCLA’s efforts, by the end of the first decade of Proposition 209’s restrictions, the campus had reached a crisis,” Said UCLA’s website. “Just 2 percent of incoming freshmen for the fall 2006 class were Black — 101 students out of a class of more than 4,800. (By comparison, 7 percent of UCLA’s first-year students were Black in 1994 and 1995, the two years prior to Proposition 209.)