by Robin Landry

Created on: March 05, 2009   Last Updated: May 02, 2011

As an African-American and as a woman I will always be grateful for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and various pieces of Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity legislation that followed. Growing up in the late 1960s and 70s I often heard the horror stories told by my parents and grandparents regarding the usually blatant and often hateful discrimination which they faced on a daily basis. They related countless situations in which they and their honest and hard-working friends and neighbors were denied the right even to apply for certain jobs for no other reason than the color of their skin.

The plight of women before Affirmative Action was much the same. My Caucasian mother-in-law has often remarked that as a young woman her only career options were: teacher, secretary, or nurse and that she was thrilled when her own daughters had the opportunity to choose from a much wider array of possible occupations.

But in spite of all of the genuine good that has resulted from Affirmative Action over the years the topic remains controversial, especially when dealing with the notion of reverse discrimination. Is reverse discrimination a problem? Does reverse discrimination even exist? In order to attempt to answer these questions I decided to take a look back at how the idea of reverse discrimination got its start.

I was a fourteen year old high school freshman when the reverse discrimination case of Allan Bakke hit the national headlines back in 1977. I remembered the uproar that the whole idea of "reverse discrimination" caused at the time, but I had never delved into the details of the case (and strangely the case is not mentioned in my son's high school U.S. History textbook at all). Some of the facts surrounding Allan Bakke were interesting, to say the least.

Allan Bakke was a Caucasian man who filed a reverse discrimination lawsuit based on allegations that the University of California Davis had rejected him for admission to their medical school program while admitting minority candidates with lower grades and test scores. The thing that I found intriguing, however, was that Allan Bakke was not what would be considered a "typical" medical school applicant.

At the time Bakke applied to UC Davis he was thirty-two years old, was a Vietnam veteran, and already had a Master's degree in Engineering. He was actually employed as an engineer at NASA when he decided to make a career change and apply to medical school. Various sources indicate that

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