Stephen Henderson (WXYZ photo)
The Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday upholding the ban on affirmative action at Michigan's state-run universities was bound to trigger strong feelings and opinions.
Enter Stephen Henderson, the Detroit Free Press' chief editorial page writer, who just landed the coveted Pulitzer prize for his commentary on the city's woes.
Henderson, in a column prominently displayed on the Freep's website, writes that he got his first newspaper job during the deep recession of the early 1990s, thanks for concerns about race.
He writes:
The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader had a hiring freeze. But I’d been a cracker-jack summer intern and the paper had never — never — had an African American on its editorial board. The paper’s parent company waived the freeze and helped pay my salary as part of a program aimed at increasing minority presence in newsrooms.
More than 20 years later, a writing and editing career that has spanned five cities and been recognized with more than a dozen national awards culminated in last Monday’s announcement that I had won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Opportunity, based at least in part on race, opened the door to that career.
Henderson goes on to write that the ban on that the ban on race-conscious policies at public institutions "is awful policy, shutting doors that were beginning to open for people like me, in a country whose history is defined by efforts to keep blacks out — of colleges, of jobs, of neighborhoods and of restaurants."
He notes:
There’s a compelling desire in our culture to pretend that history doesn’t matter anymore, to say opportunity is now equal in America.
But how absurd is that?
