A Blow for Racial Justice

‘This is not a normal court,” President Biden grumbled Thursday after the Supreme Court ruled against the use of (naked and massive) racial preferences in university admissions. “Normal” plainly means whatever he agrees with. And no matter that public opinion strongly opposes such extreme “affirmative action.” The Supremes triumphantly reaffirmed our nation’s fundamental values.

For decades, elite universities public and private — like the University of North Carolina and Harvard, the schools in the case — have used race as a key admissions criterion.

Ostensibly, it’s to diversify student bodies and redress past wrongs. But in practice it means a massive new wrong done, mainly to Asian American students who were disproportionately denied admission despite far better grades and standardized test scores.

It was the same ugly story of Jews in US higher ed early in the 20th century: Hardworking, high-achieving kids (often children of immigrants) excel by the proclaimed standards of our elite institutions, only for those institutions to drop those standards once “too many” of the wrong kind of student start getting in the gate.

Worse still, there’s no evidence this new injustice actually did any good.

Yes, it advanced a shallow, “headcount” diversity. But it shoehorned unprepared students into high-pressure learning environments. So issues of “mismatch” — where those unprepared students fail to thrive in and stay with tougher disciplines, like engineering or pre-med — persist.

Naturally, lefties blame this too on racism (not realizing that it’s their racism at fault).

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” so “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

And: “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Hear, hear. If anything’s not “normal” here, it’s that American higher education got away with its embrace of naked racial discrimination for so long (and no doubt will keep trying to do it on the sly).

This ruling was a blow for real equality — not the specious kind progressives fight for.