The Racism That SCOTUS Just Allowed

Knew this day was coming ever since Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat away from Barack Obama. One of the driving missions of the Far Right lawyers and judges of the last 30 years has been to overturn the use of Affirmative Action in college applications, and today the heavily Far Right Supreme Court pretty much nuked that system from orbit. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog: 

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that college admissions programs can consider race merely to allow an applicant to explain how their race influenced their character in a way that would have a concrete effect on the university. But a student “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. The majority effectively, though not explicitly, overruled its 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s consideration of race “as one factor among many, in an effort to assemble a student body that is diverse in ways broader than race.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the Roberts opinion.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor – a graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School who once called herself “the perfect affirmative action baby” – dissented, in an opinion that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor emphasized that the majority’s decision had rolled “back decades of precedent and momentous progress” and “cement[ed] a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.”

The reason race-based college admission practices existed in the first place was to confront the near century-long period of segregation in the American workplace, something determined by our educational backgrounds. Young people getting hired to the best jobs tend to graduate from the better-ranked universities. Having Harvard or Yale on your resume - or depending on your region, the University of Texas in that state or University of Florida in that one - opens doors that having Florida Poly or Middle Tennessee VoTech couldn't.

Even well-established Black colleges like Howard, Florida A&M, or Morehouse can't compete if someone with a Juris Doctorate from Stanford or a medical degree from Duke stepped through the door looking for a job.

It's also a question of diversity, of getting the demographics of the nation - if not the state that university was in - to reflect the communities these college students were going to join as adults. Given how the state of Mississippi is roughly 37 percent Black, would it make sense that Ole Miss or Southern Miss or Mississippi State be so segregated that the White students never meet a single Black student? That sort of segregation before the 1960s in our schools made it easier to maintain that segregation in our societies since the post-Reconstruction Era.

And yet, here comes Roberts' conservative court, declaring "race-neutral" should be in effect when deciding who gets to enter our higher education. Like as though other factors like gender, income, and family connections aren't as problematic. Hell, the worst thing in college enrollments are the Legacy applicants: Students who get in not because they're at the top of the class but because their parents or grandparents are alumni, especially the alums who donate million-dollar building projects as a quid pro quo.

When I got into the University of Florida back in 1988, I wasn't a Legacy (my mom was Auburn, and was sore disappoint none of her sons went War Eagle), nor was I disadvantaged. Affirmative Action had no discernable affect on me. I was White, yes, but I graduated in the top two percent of my high school and scored in the top five percent of the SATs that year and I had sufficient AP and dual enrollment credits to appease the registrar's office.

The thing for Affirmation Action was that it gave disadvantaged students - often poor, and in this systemic racist nation often ethnic minority - an equal opportunity that I had to apply and enroll at what was - and hopefully still is in spite of DeSantis' recent sabotage - the top university in the state, as well as one of the top universities when it came to business, education, medicine (major pharmacy program if I recall), and journalism (the reason I applied). As a result, I attended classes with several Black students, socially interacted with them on occasion - I was to my personal shame something of an introvert, which haunts me to this day - and had no negative experiences sharing the campus with them. The biggest negative experience I got was from a white graduate student who yelled at me for biking on the wrong side of the road.

With this ruling, the Supreme Court isn't exactly banning colleges from considering race when reviewing their applicants, but they can sure as hell ignore race when rejecting those disadvantaged kids in favor of more Legacy (read: White and Wealthy) students whose parents can pay into school endowment coffers more readily. 

Elie Mystal at the Nation has a more thorough and bitter debunking of the Supreme Court's moves today (paywalled):

It has been a long goodbye. The Supreme Court declared race consciousness in college admissions, also known as affirmative action, unconstitutional today. The vote was predictable, 6-3, with all the justices appointed by Republican presidents standing together to revoke the policy. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts himself, who ruled that affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was, of course, written explicitly to revoke the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s Constitution, but Roberts doesn’t care about all that. His opinion attempts to capture the 14th Amendment and redeploy it to justify a white version of “color blindness” that just so happens to lock in a status quo that benefits whites...

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on the Supreme Court delivered the fatal blow, the policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into whatever “elite” school they were hoping for... Some of the most horribly racist claptrap folks have felt comfortable saying to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don’t like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow “unearned” because they were “given” to me by affirmative action.

That last bit is in some ways the most devastating: Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I’ve had white folks whom I could standardize-test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy—whose parents’ name was on one of the buildings on campus—who asked me how it felt to know I got “extra help” to get in. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping...

The actual cases decided today involve lawsuits brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group of AAPI (Asian American/Pacific Islander) students organized by white conservative legal gadfly Ed Blum. Blum has made it his life’s work to destroy affirmative action, and in this case, he found plaintiffs eager to argue that affirmative action policies discriminate against AAPI students who don’t get into elite schools despite competitive grades and standardized test scores.

On the facts, Blum and SFFA are simply wrong. The district court (the finder of fact in our federal system) found that the universities do not intentionally discriminate against AAPI students—and, more specifically, that there is no evidence that affirmative action is hurting them. (I have written that I think Harvard does discriminate against AAPI applicants, but that discrimination has nothing to do with affirmative action.) What this means is the entire argument against affirmative action is based on the feelings of some students (and their parents) that they would have gotten into these schools if the schools admitted fewer Black people, but that too is a thin argument. Getting rid of affirmative action will neither require schools to admit more AAPI students nor force them to weigh so-called “merit-based” factors more heavily. In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities...

Policies like affirmative action, as I mentioned above, were first enacted in this country during Reconstruction. Any good-faith “originalist” argument would have to acknowledge that the authors of the 14th Amendment contemplated the use of affirmative action, and we know that because affirmative action was used in their own lifetimes, after the ratification of the amendment.

But the conservatives did not adopt originalism for its good-faith arguments. They’re not ending affirmative action to help Asian American students get into Harvard or UNC. The conservative majority is ending affirmative action because college admissions are maybe the only place in American life where being white isn’t an automatic benefit to the possessor of precious white skin...

To wit, historically, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been white women. Women held only 35 percent of bachelor degrees before affirmative action policies were reintroduced; now, women’s enrollment in college outpaces men, and has for some time. Now, elite colleges and universities are giving men a boost in admissions considerations, because their grades and scores are not keeping pace with women’s.

Yet you’ll note that the Supreme Court did not ban gender consciousness in college admissions. Nor did it ban legacy consciousness, wealth consciousness, geographic consciousness, or athletic consciousness. Race, and only race, is the thing the conservatives don’t want colleges and universities to look at. Because race is the card white people use that never gets declined. It is their most powerful characteristic, the one through which all else is possible.

Even with what Mystal says, the response to today's end of Affirmative Action won't make it easier for White kids to enroll in the colleges of their choice. It's going to make it easier for mediocre RICH White kids who didn't earn the privilege to enroll in the top universities and force everyone else - even poor Whites with great grades - into lesser-valued schools.

The elitism is going to get worse.

Fuck Harvard and Yale. Fuck the Ivies. Fuck my alma mater UF if they dare decide to segregate again.

Start hiring more college grads from the universities that still push for student diversity in spite of the conservative outrage against them.

There has to be other ways to ensure diversity and merit in our educational system, if only to work towards ensuring that diversity and merit in our whole society. Access to higher education is one of the few equalizers we have in American society to undo the damage of centuries of racism, and this Supreme Court just took that away. There is nothing neutral or color-blind in the United States, conservative judges, stop pretending there is.