I received a call from a white friend mid-morning yesterday with the assumption that I would be livid over the Supreme Court effectively striking down Affirmative Action in its ruling involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard. To her surprise, I seemed unaffected. Anger and shock are generally reserved for the unanticipated, and the Supreme Court ruling was neither shocking nor unexpected. In a tepid impression of Nostradamus, I had written about the wholly predictable outcome on Monday. I warned against liberals backflipping over two rulings overturning the gerrymandered voter maps in Alabama and Louisiana days before. I saw it as greasing the skids for yesterday’s ruling. Like the Court’s verdicts in Dobbs v. Jackson or Students For Fair Admissions Inc. v. President And Fellows Of Harvard College, precedent was ignored, and no basis or predicate in law was established.
Inexplicably the Court decided yesterday that institutional racism has ended in America, and leveling the playing field is no longer needed. Oddly they excluded the military academies, and athletic scholarships were also exempted. Despite empirical evidence from California and eight other states that outlawed Affirmative Action, the Court ignored the lowering of its minority enrollment—in those states—as a factor. I had been waiting for this ruling since Mitch McConnell deemed the country was in a redemptive, reparative, and post-racial era by electing a black president, “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president,”said McConnell. The obvious counter to Senator McConnell’s argument is the exponential rise in hate groups since the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama.
The questions surrounding Affirmative Action have evolved from a moral question into a conservative political imperative. Twenty-four years past the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case of 1954 and ten years past the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the Court in the California v. Bakke case ruled Affirmative Action Constitutional while invalidating racial quotas. In 2003 Justice Sandra Day O’Connor published her concurrent opinion, which upheld Affirmative Action speculating the matter could be revisited, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” The previous rulings left room for the overturning of Affirmative Action because whether the Justices were afraid to etch their names on the wrong side of history books or cloaking racism in law like in Plessy v. Ferguson was preferable.
Yesterday Chief Justice Roberts added to the Court’s cowardly contradiction—offering, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,”Roberts wrote. The Court entirely skirted the issue of legacy admissions, whereby if granddaddy and daddy graduated Harvard, the door is open to junior. In 2022 thirty-six percent of accepted Harvard students were so-called legacies. The conservative Court avoided the issue like a Covid vaccine because the majority are white.
The Court apparently sees diversity as not only patriotic but advantageous to our military, “This opinion… does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present,”wrote Roberts. By exempting military academies and athletics, America has again told blacks in this country that their bodies are valuable but not their minds.
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