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President Joe Biden and the NAACP blasted the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ‘s decision to ban affirmative action to admit students to US colleges.
“I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court decision to effectively end affirmative action in higher education,” Biden said in a text message to Americans. “We will not retreat from our commitment to equal opportunity for all – so today, I’m announcing new actions my Administration will take to keep the doors of opportunity open to every American.”
The Biden administration put out a 6-point plan in response to the SCOTUS decision that, while not surprising, sent shockwaves across the nation.
The proposals include asking colleges and universities to consider adversity when selecting their most qualified applicants and increasing transparency in college admissions and enrollment practices.
The case Students for Fair Admissions vs University of North Carolina and Harvard University, argued the colleges admission practices discriminated against white and Asian students.
Click Here To Read The SCOTUS Ruling and Justices Opinions
Quote
“Our country has never been colorblind, Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.”
–Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson dissenting opinion on why the US still needs affirmative action.
NAACP blasted SCOTUS.
“The Supreme Court is woefully misguided and out of touch,” NAACP said in a Twitter message. “The research is clear. Learning environments that are racially, economically, and otherwise integrated increase educational experiences and outcomes for all students.”
In a report supporting affirmative action posted it the NAACP website, the civil rights organization argued using race as a factor has helped bridge equality in the US.
“By allowing highly selective schools to take into consideration more than SAT scores and class ranking, admissions offices are able to combat systemic barriers that traditionally keep talented students from their pipeline,” NAACP report said.
NAACP argued that affirmative action bans in several states are already having a negative impact on Blacks and Hispanics.
“Following California’s ban in 1996, enrollment of students of color at the state’s top schools fell more than 50% and earnings for Black and Hispanic graduates decreased,” NAACP said.
“After Michigan banned affirmative action in 2006, the University of Michigan’s Black student population fell from 7% in 2006 to 4% in 2022, in a state whose high school population is 17% Black. Further, Black and Native student enrollment has declined by 44% and 90% since the ban.”
Quote:
“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”
— Justice Clarence Thomas critique of Ketanji Brown-Jackson position in the affirmative action ruling.
By a vote of 6-3 cast along ideological lines, the Court’s six conservative justices voted to end the practice, saying it discriminated against white and Asian students while benefitting students from underrepresented groups such as African Americans and Hispanics.
Rolling back the 45-year precedent, Chief Justice John Roberts said Harvard and UNC engaged in racial stereotyping and lacked clear objectives and an end-point for their practices.
“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts declared.
Writing for the dissenting justices, Sonia Sotomayor, a Yale and Princeton Law Schools graduate, who once said she considers herself a perfect affirmative action baby, said the majority ruling had rolled back decades of precedent and momentous progress while cementing a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society.
Sotomayor called out Roberts for selectively applying the ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger; a 2003 case used as affirmative action precedence where SCOTUS ruled 5-4 with the majority favoring race as a valid factor to consider for admissions in the University of Michigan Law School.
The question in front of the Supreme Court then was whether considering race in the admissions process violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court held that the Equal Protection Clause does not prohibit the Law School from considering race, among other individual factors, in admissions decisions to advance a compelling interest in obtaining educational benefits from a diverse student body.
Roberts cited Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s argument in the majority that “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
But Sotomayor noted the Chief Justice was “cherry-picking the language from Grutter” and turning away from “uncomfortable truths.”
“Because the Court cannot escape the inevitable truth that race matters in students’ lives,” Sotomayor wrote, “it announces a false promise to save face and appear attuned to reality. No one is fooled.”
Justice Clarence Thomas Vs. Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson
But perhaps the sharpest exchange came from the Court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown-Jackson, representing the conservative and liberal wings of the Court.
Thomas, the longest-service justice in the Court and arguably the most conservative, is perhaps the most strident critic of affirmative action. He has argued that the policy stigmatized him as he rose through the ranks in life.
Thomas did not hold back.
“I have long believed that large racial preferences in college admissions “stamp [blacks and Hispanics] with a badge of inferiority,” Thomas wrote. “They thus “tain[t] the accomplishments of all those who are admitted as a result of racial discrimination” as well as “all those who are the same race as those admitted as a result of racial discrimination” because “no one can distinguish those students from the ones whose race played a role in their admission.”
He argued that as a result of affirmative action when Blacks and Hispanics take a high position in government, industry, or academia, “it’s an open question whether their skin color played a part in their advancement.”
Thomas repudiated Brown-Jackson’s position as a grim outlook on racial equality in America.
“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today,” Thomas wrote in concurrence. “The panacea, she counsels, is to unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field,’ all as judged by racial metrics. I strongly disagree.”
Thomas argued that Brown-Jackson wrongly sees everything in America from a racial lens.
“Worse still, Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims. Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds,” Thomas wrote. “Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”
Quote:
“Consider the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934, which insured highly desirable bank mortgages. Eligibility for this insurance required an FHA appraisal of the property to ensure a low default risk. But, nationwide, it was FHA’s established policy to provide “no guarantees for mortgages to African Americans, or to whites who might lease to African Americans,” irrespective of creditworthiness.”
“No surprise, then, that “[b]etween 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of FHA loans went to white Americans,” with whole cities (ones that had a disproportionately large number of Black people due to housing segregation) sometimes being deemed ineligible for FHA intervention on racial grounds,” Brown-Jackson added.
–Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
However, Brown-Jackson, the newest justice in the Court, did not consider the case in keeping with her confirmation promise that she’d recuse herself because of her connection with Harvard’s Board of Overseers.
Brown-Jackson’s 28-page dissent responded to Thomas’ attacks in perhaps what could be considered a masterclass in racial discrimination history Blacks have endured in the US.
“Our country has never been colorblind,” Brown-Jackson wrote. “Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.”
Brown-Jackson gave examples of how race had played a role in disadvantaging Blacks who were brought into the US as enslaved people, used for labor, and denied rights to own property even when the laws permitted them. She gave examples of race-linked obstacles that hindered prosperity for Black people, such as sharecropping and Jim Crow laws.
She gave instances where State and Federal government “selective interventions” disadvantaged black people and denied them the opportunity to build generational wealth.
“Consider the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created in 1934, which insured highly desirable bank mortgages. Eligibility for this insurance required an FHA appraisal of the property to ensure a low default risk,” Brown-Jackson wrote. “But, nationwide, it was FHA’s established policy to provide “no guarantees for mortgages to African Americans, or to whites who might lease to African Americans,” irrespective of creditworthiness.”
“No surprise, then, that “[b]etween 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of FHA loans went to white Americans,” with whole cities (ones that had a disproportionately large number of Black people due to housing segregation) sometimes being deemed ineligible for FHA intervention on racial grounds,” Brown-Jackson added.
She said with past historical injustices that overwhelmingly disadvantaged Blacks and advantaged whites, it’s prudent to consider race in college admissions.
Brown-Jackson chided the majority for what she termed as having “a wholly self-referential, two-dimensional flatness” about how race impacts life in the US and pointed out that their ignorance did not change the reality.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” Brown-Jackson wrote. “And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
Brown-Jackson responds to Thomas in the footnotes of her argument, saying his opinion “demonstrates his obsession with race consciousness that far ourstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”
She dismisses as a strawman argument Thomas’s lofty assertions that admission programs should advance all Americans’ pursuit of equality similarly to other aspects of identity.
“The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room— the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential,” Brown-Jackson wrote.
She concluded with a warning.
“By insisting that obvious truths be ignored, they prevent our problem-solving institutions from directly addressing the real import and impact of “social racism” and “government-imposed racism, thereby deterring our collective progression toward becoming a society where race no longer matters.”
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