Earlier this week, I predicted that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would routinely school the racists in robes beside her on the Supreme Court bench when they seek to impose a "colorblind" history on this country. In her dissent to their decision to kill off affirmative action in higher education, she's at it again.
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. 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. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.
UNC [Univeristy of North Carolina] has thus built a review process that more accurately assesses merit than most of the admissions programs that have existed since this country’s founding. Moreover, in so doing, universities like UNC create pathways to upward mobility for long excluded and historically disempowered racial groups. Our Nation’s history more than justifies this course of action. And our present reality indisputably establishes that such programs are still needed—for the general public good—because after centuries of state-sanctioned (and enacted) race discrimination, the aforementioned intergenerational race-based gaps in health, wealth, and well-being stubbornly persist. Rather than leaving well enough alone, today, the majority is having none of it. Turning back the clock (to a time before the legal arguments and evidence establishing the soundness of UNC’s holistic admissions approach existed), the Court indulges those who either do not know our Nation’s history or long to repeat it. Simply put, the race-blind admissions stance the Court mandates from this day forward is unmoored from critical real-life circumstances. Thus, the Court’s meddling not only arrests the noble generational project that America’s universities are attempting, it also launches, in effect, a dismally misinformed sociological experiment.
We know this is true. California outlawed affirmative action programs in the state university system in 1996 -- and Black and Latino students have never recovered the ground they lost.
Black and Hispanic student representation at UC Berkeley both dropped by around 50 percent immediately following the ban. Those students probably attended less selective public universities in the state, the analysis suggests. ...
[Zachary Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University], who studied the long-term impacts of California’s ban, has found that Black and Hispanic students who attended less selective universities have poorer outcomes, such as lower graduation rates, graduate school enrollment and income.
“[At more selective schools] they might have been able to build networks that they couldn’t have otherwise had, learned certain kinds of information that were just not available to them in their high school setting,” Bleemer said.
A sad day. But the Court continues to delegitimize itself and our job is to help it along. We can refuse to repeat history.
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