Supreme Court shocked, shocked, at racial stereotyping
Trump’s Supreme Court gets another win:
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution.
And yet the Constitution was fine with race-based slavery for all those years. Funny how that works. You’d think “people from Africa are destined to be enslaved by people from Britain” would be at least as much “employing race in a negative manner” and “involving racial stereotyping” as giving the grandchildren of those enslaved people a leg up in education.
This is original intent on steroids. The founders didn’t allow universities to admit minorities preferentially, so it isn’t part of the proper modern university! (Note: the colleges and universities of the time didn’t allow women either. Gear up for MRA lawsuits in 5…4…3…)
Ophelia:
Normally your logic is sound, even where I disagree with you. But I’m struggling with it here.
The fact that the original constitution was interpreted as allowing slavery was why they passed the 13th and 14th Amendments, abolishing slavery and prohibiting race-based discrimination. And it’s that same 14th Amendment that now means (the court has now ruled) that universities may not implement race-based discrimination in admissions.
Similarly, the Civil Rights Act 1964 was passed as a response to the Jim Crow era, again in order to prohibit race-based discrimination. And it’s that same Civil Rights Act 1964 that now means that universities may not implement race-based discrimination in admissions.
So the ruling is not based on the original slavery-allowing constitution.
PS Only a minority of beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions today are descendants of slaves (more often they’re from post-slavery migration), and those that are are more like great, great, great grandchildren of slaves than grandchildren.
Well since racism doesn’t exist anymore (according to the Ignorati), the attempts to balance the scales can be done away with, right? Look at all those POC on Fox News nowadays.
Yes affirmative action is an explicitly racist policy, but it’s a positive one meant to equalize ongoing negative racism. I guess we’ll see how the numbers shift in the wake of this ruling.
If you’re black, arguable. If you’re Asian, no positive racism for you.
IANACL, but my understanding was not that Affirmative Action guaranteed racial minorities attendance at the college, but that they must be considered in proportion to their population in the selection group. In other words, it’s a measurement that they are not excluded from fair consideration. If that’s the case, if they are not given preference due to their racial background, then I wouldn’t consider it racism. Perhaps someone who knows the law and the case can shed some light.
Mike, I’m also not a lawyer, but my understanding is similar. But…I don’t know how often I have heard leftie white males say they are for AA, BUT…they know how it feels to lose a job to someone less qualified.
The default assumptions: (1) The affirmative action hiree is less qualified (and since I rarely meet someone who lost a job to a MORE qualified individual, at least by their report, this goes without saying; and (2) the hiree has never known what it feels like to lose a job to someone less qualified.
As a woman, I have failed to get jobs for which I was the most qualified applicant, with the exception of my having no penis. (I’m not sure what role a penis performs in water permits; I’d rather not know). This has gone to the extreme of having them pull a job listing because they had to give me priority (because of my internship), then repost it the day after I left…and hire someone who did not meet the minimum qualifications.
With this decision, people won’t have to worry about ass-covering games anymore; they can have an office full of white males.
Lady M @4 There is much negative racism against Asians as well. Where I grew up in the California Delta, much of the work on the levee system, and also the building of the railroads in the Western U.S. was accomplished by “Coolies,” who were no more than indentured servants, mostly Chinese, along with other Asian and Indian people. I think the difference here lies between forced and voluntary immigration. How they were treated when they got here by those in power was despicable.
Mike and Ikn, this is the way I understood most AA policies as well: that they should reflect the proportion of the general population. This sounds fair in theory, but the implementation hasn’t lived up to the ideal, for better or worse. I have lost work due to AA as well, but the people I lost work to wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise, due to the cronyism and racism of the industry I was in.
I find it hard to lament Nigerians losing out to Chinese students under these new rules…
Here’s Coleman Hughes on the topic, giving a good summary of the issues and why he supports the ruling.
As far as ethnicities go, UC Berkeley for example, Fall 2022 enrollment numbers >>
https://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data-new-undergraduates
Black 3.6%
Asian 52.1%
Hispanic 21.1%
Native American 1.8%
White 28.7%
With California demographics in 2020 >>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California
Black 5.7%
Asian 15.9%
Hispanic 39.4%
Native American 1.9%
White 41.2%
Make of it what you will…
Coel @10 To hell with Coleman Hughes, what do YOU think, or is that determined by Coleman Hughes?
So 63% of the percentage of the black population of California (while collapsing in both ADoS and various actual Africans) and 69% of the percentage of the white population in California are represented. This is a disparity in the Kendian sense, but it isn’t much of one. The Hispanic disparity is of considerably more significance (and everyone knows that the macro group of “Asians” are better students than everyone else barring recent African immigrants).
BKiSA @13 That’s about the size of it. This is under the effects of AA. I’ll be interested to see the developments in the next few years with the new SC ruling.
@twiliter:
I agree with outlawing race-based discrimination. I think that people should be treated fairly as individuals, based on their individual circumstances, character and abilities, and should not be regarded primarily as a member of a group, where the group identity matters more than the individual. Indeed, I consider that Western Enlightenment values are based on that premise.
However, proponents of “affirmative action” don’t agree on its rationale, and give a range of different ustifications.
“Because black kids get treated unfairly and we need to compensate for that” — except that there’s precious little evidence for that these days, and there hasn’t been since the 1980s or so.
“As reparations for slavery/Jim Crow/redlining” — except that today’s teenagers suffered none of that.
“Because black kids tends to come from worse socio-economic backgrounds (partly as a result of the previous item)” — except so do plenty of kids from other races, since the distributions overlap hugely, and if that were genuinely your motive then you would instead base any preferential treatment on socio-economic status regardless of race.
“Because diversity is a good thing for a university”, though there’s not much hard evidence for that, and if you really thought that then you’d be against the historically-black HBCU universities which concentrate black students, prefering to share them out among universities in general. And, further, those most lauding affirmative action and diversity as bringing in a range of perspectives are often the first to react with horror if anyone in a university says anything they disagree with.
“Because we need sufficient black representation among America’s future leaders, so need to boost black presence at elite universities” — which is a fair argument, but it’s a purely political one. And there are lots of other routes to leadership (leaders tend to come from elite universities mostly because the most capable people tend to get into the elite universities).
PS to add: I should have said, I make no apology for considering the writings of Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter, Wilfred Reilly, Glenn Loury, and others such, while forming my own opinions.
Coel @15 Well, thanks for that reply!
” …those most lauding affirmative action and diversity as bringing in a range of perspectives are often the first to react with horror if anyone in a university says anything they disagree with.”
I’ll agree with that, well put.
I think that you and I still disagree somewhat about the presence of racism in the U.S. It has become better since the 80’s, no doubt, but only through people acknowledging it and taking steps to educate people and implementing playing field levelling policies. I think it’s entirely possible to overcompenstate, especially when it comes to policy, but so far I haven’t seen that happen. I suppose we’ll see if overturning AA is premature.
@16 Of course, but since they don’t comment here (that I know of), I’d rather hear your opinions on things. :)
I’m completely shocked that Clarence Thomas, who benefited from affirmative action, has decided to pull up the ladder (sarcasm very much intended). This is simply more evidence that the Supreme Court is wholly bought and paid for.
Yes, that’s amply demonstrated by Dubya Bush and Donald Trump. Seriously, elite universities are an elite game. You can get as good an education, and be as smart, in a state school, but most people assume the elite universities have better students. Somehow I don’t imagine we’re going to see the SCOTUS ruling against legacy admissions, clearly discriminatory, and allowing good students to be bypassed while inferior students are admitted.
And it isn’t just grades. You have to have tons of extracurriculars, and the right kind of extracurriculars, things that aren’t available to poor kids living on a farm in Oklahoma. Working your ass off taking care of younger siblings, cooking and cleaning for a lazy mother, etc, are not sufficient. They are not considered extracurriculars at all.
So please, tell me again that the elite universities have the smartest students? In theory, yes. But what they have in practice is elite students…by the old meaning of elite…old money.
Bush and Trump didn’t become notable people because they went to elite schools, rather they went to elite schools because they came from notable families.
This is in-line with my critique of the idea that we need to ensure black representation at Harvard etc in order to produce black leaders. It’s not the school that makes the difference.
As for whether Clarence Thomas benefitted from affirmative action, perhaps, but you could equally say he’s been perpetually disadvantaged by the tag “diversity hire” hanging over his entire career.
Indeed, those black students who could succeed on merit are amongst those substantially harmed by affirmative action, for this reason.
Lastly, a clear indication that affirmative action is the wrong policy is that it is surrounded by dishonesty and taboos. An example is Harvard’s admissions people assigning low “personality” scores to Asian-American students that they’d never even met.
Or, if a professor laments that students admitted with lower grades under affirmative action then tend to score below the class average, then they get instantly fired. Indeed, merely being in a zoom call and failing to dissent from such a suggestion gets you fired!
We need to return to an academia where people can discuss the issues in an evidence-based fashion openly and honesty.
I disagree with this:
I think racism has gotten better mostly through younger generations giving up the prejudices of older generations. Once upon a time, white kids would catch hell for hanging out with black kids. Today it’s nothing. All the lecturing and hectoring and administrative decisions in the world accomplish less than making friends, in terms of overcoming prejudice.
I do not usually agree with Coel, but I think he is largely right here. I think, though, that, in addition to attending to his usual concern about black people, he might attend to the question of ‘legacy preferences’, which constitute, as an article by Richard Kahlenberg that the thoughtful conservative website The Bulwark draws attention to, ‘a practice akin to affirmative action for the rich and opposed by 75 percent of Americans’ . The ‘rich’, of course, are usually white. The rest of what The Bulwark writes on this issue is well worth reading, particularly in what it says about Asian-Americans being treated much as Jews were in a fair bit, perhaps most, of the 20th century – in the 1920s, Harvard introduced a quota for Jewish students, as did other universities. There is also the fact that private colleges, according to the book ‘Of Boys and Men: Why it Matters and What to Do About It’, increasingly engage in what amounts to ‘affirmative action’ for males, since if they did not the student bodies of such colleges would become largely female.
Coel @ 21 – Just one small peripheral question – in what sense did Trump come from a “notable family” when he got into Wharton? Rich, yes, but notable? Fred Trump who owned several apartment buildings in Queens?
Thanks for the link to Hughes’ essay, Coel. It’s a good one. Regarding Hughes’ tenth point, discussing the greater importance of education for minority kids before college, it seems remarkable to me that Harvard, which has a school of education, does so little to help. Harvard is right across the river from Boston, which spends the most per capita on public school students but is failing them, especially minority students, so badly that it’s on the brink of state receivership. Has Harvard done anything to help minority students in its own area, or any other?
If Harvard wants more qualified minority applicants, shouldn’t it step up and help more minority kids get better educated instead of just putting a race check-box on its applications and throwing out Asian applications? Boston has a Boston College lab school and a Conservatory lab school. Where is Harvard Lab School?
Real education is much more difficult than empty talk about DEI. Throwing out the easy way to pretend you care about diversity might make Harvard try harder.
@Ophelia:
Well, notably rich anyhow. But the point is that Trump’s subsequent career and rise to notoriety derived from his taking over his father’s business interests, not from having been to a prestigious school.
Well that’s a point but I’m not sure it was the point you were making.
Papito @25
Excellent point.
Only a tiny minority of beneficiaries of that affirmative action are descendants of American slaves. Most black beneficiaries of modern AA at the level of the Ivy League are either the children of recent (well-to-do) immigrants or are themselves foreign students from wealthy families looking to break into the American-led global elite.
Of the slave-descendents who do make it to the billionaires’ finishing schools (and who are still identifiable as black), almost all are at least middle-class already. The vast majority of poor black slave-descendents with good academic prospects make use of the exact same programs that poor white folks do — Pell grants and such. On the other hand, the AA sieve is weighted quite heavily against Asian applicants, regardless of their wealth or supposed “extracurricular” activities, such activities having been introduced to acceptance criteria at Harvard and Yale in a bygone age to sift out all those goddamned Jews who kept passing all their entrance tests.
Using a population which hardly — if at all, on balance — benefits from a program to justify the measurable hurdles that program puts in place of a separate population (notably not white, though often tarred as “white-adjacent” by race hustlers) doesn’t strike me as a particularly effective defence of the program. It doesn’t exactly bring dignity to the descendents of American slaves, either.
Jeff Maurer and Freddie deBoer, neither with a conservative molecule between them, have good and informative takes on this, if you believe black conservatives such as Hughes or Sowell are too biased.