If nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come, it is also true that ideas merchants can wait aeons for that moment. Even those eventually hailed as prophets risk being dismissed as cranks. Edward Blum has courted such disdain in the decades he has dedicated to opposing race-conscious policies in America. “I’m a one-trick pony,” he says of his mission.
Mr Blum’s story is a parable of America’s evolving debate on diversity. Over the years he won court battles over universities and voting rules. Heather Mac Donald, a conservative campaigner, recently said he “has done more to eradicate racial preferences from our body politic than any other human being alive today”. He has also faced setbacks and criticism. Now the federal government has joined his cause with a vengeance. Mr Blum’s time has come.
He is not a lawyer, though on civil-rights issues “he might as well be,” says Adam Mortara, who has pleaded some of his cases. Mr Blum grew up in a liberal Jewish household in Texas but moved right in the 1980s (he was “the first Republican my mother ever met”). Since no Republican was running in his district, he stood for Congress in Houston in 1992. He lost—but, after hiring a real-estate lawyer from Louisiana, challenged what he saw as the racial gerrymandering of Texan districts. The Supreme Court struck them down.
So began a legal crusade, by turns quixotic and triumphant, which, says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Centre for Justice, a think-tank, “has had a significant impact on the law and on our culture”. Mr Blum likens his role to that of Yente, the matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof”. Perceiving an injustice, he finds suitable plaintiffs, willing lawyers and donors to pay them.
His next big win came in 2013. He orchestrated a challenge to the parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that obliged states with records of racial discrimination to clear election-rule changes with the government or a federal court. Since America had “changed dramatically”, ruled the Supreme Court, those bits of the act were outdated. A rush of new regulations followed (on voter-ID and the like); the gap between black and white turnout has since widened, reports Ms Weiser, especially in places affected by the judgment.
But Mr Blum’s most spectacular coup came in 2023. For 15 years he contested the use of race in college admissions, first pursuing his alma mater, the University of Texas, then, through a group called Students for Fair Admissions, going after Harvard and the University of North Carolina for allegedly discriminating against Asian-Americans. Ruling on those cases, the Supreme Court nixed affirmative action by universities. It is hard to disentangle the effects of these decisions from those of other measures, but overall, predicts Bryan Cook of the Urban Institute, a think-tank, campuses will become less diverse.
This campaign has had personal costs. In the 1990s Mr Blum tried (and failed) to get the city of Houston to ditch affirmative action; his employers, he recalls, forced him to choose between his investment job and his activism. In the past few years he has received a dozen death threats, he says, along with umpteen allegations of racism, abuse often tinged with antisemitism.
He isn’t a racist, maintains Mr Mortara, noting that “he’s probably been hugged by 10,000 Chinese moms.” For all his steely patience, Mr Blum is nobody’s idea of a fanatic. Even courtroom adversaries acknowledge his winsome civility. One serial opponent, Jon Greenbaum, calls him “soft-spoken” and “even-keeled”. Mr Mortara says he “has not an ounce of malice in his heart”, but rather “passionately believes in the ethos of colour-blindness”.
Motives for dedication like his can be “a bit of a mystery”, reflects Mr Blum, but he points to family chats about the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s—a struggle he believes his efforts are furthering. His work is a reminder that shared premises—in this case, the principle of equal opportunity—can be interpreted in wildly disparate ways. “Every day, I feel like I’m contributing,” he says, “to making the United States a more fair and just country.”
Mr Blum remembers seeing Willie Mays, a baseball great, stumbling in the outfield as he aged. Now 73, he will retire one day, but not yet. In America’s culture wars, he has claimed, the college rulings of 2023 were “like the Allied landing at Normandy beach”. He is braced for skirmishes over the use of mapping tools and census data as proxies for race in admissions.
Today’s fiercest clashes, however, are over alleged discrimination in the world of work (in hiring, internships, tendering and so on), which has spiked, avers Mr Blum, amid the racial-justice fervour of recent years. The American Alliance for Equal Rights, another of his pet groups, has already sued airlines, law firms, the Smithsonian museum and McDonald’s. It also sued a venture-capital outfit in Atlanta over a grant contest for black female entrepreneurs. Was that fight really worth picking? Imagine, retorts Mr Blum, if the contest had been open only to white men.
All this bespeaks an essentialist concept of identity—“Your skin colour tells me nothing about who you are as an individual”—and a sanguine, even blithe perspective on American laws and society. Yes, some people are bigoted, Mr Blum acknowledges. But in his rose-tinted judgment, civil-rights reforms mean that “there is no structural racism left in America.”
There is, in fact, plenty of evidence that discrimination still scars American lives. Mr Blum is on firmer ground in arguing that there hasn’t been a consensus in favour of “the use of race and ethnicity in public policy”, and that affirmative action has been an activist cause more than a popular one. In any event, since Donald Trump’s election—and the ensuing fusillade of orders on diversity, equity and inclusion—Mr Blum’s view, in which affirmative action is the real menace, is rampant. Race-consciousness in all forms faces a legal onslaught, not least from the government. “It’s a different kind of atmosphere,” Mr Blum observes. People are less nervous about backing him openly.
He used to drive a minivan with the number plate “1FRSTNE”, an abbreviation of the Supreme Court’s address in Washington, DC (“I am such a goofball”). His new plate reads “20TH ME”, a reference to the 20th Maine infantry regiment, which launched a heroic counterattack at Gettysburg. “I take great inspiration from impossible fights,” Mr Blum says. His seem less impossible by the day. ■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.