Ending an Outrage
Colleges’ ugly racial games
THE Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 that racial preferences in college admissions violate the US Constitution. At last! No student with high grades and test scores should be rejected in favor of a lesser applicant who happens to have the right skin color.
The evidence provided to the court showed that Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against Asian-American and white applicants. A black, Hispanic or Native American student with a combined SAT score above 1,100 might be invited to apply to Harvard, but an Asian girl would need at least 1,350 and an Asian boy at least 1,380.
The real opportunity gap in this nation is not between black and white. It’s between rich and poor.
Contrary to what most Americans assume, affirmative action has never helped poor kids. In fact, Harvard favors wealthy kids.
Only 3% of the student body come from low-income families. A staggering 67%, from families in the top fifth of the nation’s earners, per data from Harvard researcher Raj Chatty. Three-quarters of Harvard’s black and Hispanic students come from high-earning families.
Harvard offers the same admissions “bump” to “a wealthy black applicant given every advantage in life as to a black applicant from a poor family with seemingly insurmountable barriers to overcome,” stresses Justice Clarence Thomas.
All the while Harvard rejects Asian-American applicants with higher grades and test scores, even those from poor families.
College administrators are already trying to weasel around the court’s ruling by waiving standardized tests that make discrimination hard to conceal. Instead, they should be scrapping racial preferences and reaching out to economically disadvantaged students with high potential, regardless of race.
The goal should be to promote economic mobility and help keep the American dream alive.
Students from low-income families, impoverished neighborhoods and failing schools score 399 points lower on the math and English SATs than other students. If anyone needs a “bump” in the admissions process, it’s a poor kid.
Black students overall score only 56 points lower, according to a Century Foundation study.
Defenders of affirmative action insist that a racially diverse stu dent body promotes learning.
In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on a court divided over affirmative action, argued that racial considerations should be permitted to promote campus “diversity,” as Powell said students of all races would benefit from being exposed to different viewpoints. In retrospect, that’s laughable.
In fact, Harvard and other elite schools offer blacks separate dorms, lounges and even separate graduation ceremonies, guaranteeing they will have minimal interaction with students of other races.
During oral arguments, Thomas pressed lawyers for Harvard and UNC on the educational benefits of racial diversity. He got no answer. Wryly, Thomas writes: “With nearly 50 years to develop their arguments, neither Harvard nor UNC — two of the foremost research institutions in the world” — could explain the supposed link between racial diversity and educational benefit.
He suggests that “two white students, one from Appalachia and one from a wealthy, San Francisco suburb,” may offer more diversity than two students, one black and one white, who attended elite schools on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It’s racist to assume that a black student has a different viewpoint simply because of a different skin color.
The left and its media allies bash the court for discarding supposed “decades of precedent.” Yet there is no precedent for permanent affirmative action. The court didn’t intend for it to last forever.
When it upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School in 2003, the justices knew “this is dangerous and it has to have an end point,” explained Justice Amy Coney Barrett. That’s when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it should no longer be necessary in 25 years (i.e., five years from now). Yet, when Barrett pressed UNC’s lawyers and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar for a time when they could see it ending, she got no answer.
The right answer is now. Affirmative action is a euphemism for an ugly process: reverse discrimination; 25 more years will make no prettier.
The left insists the court is recklessly departing from precedent to favor its conservative political agenda. Not so. It is the three liberal justices who are actually discarding precedent. They’re inventing a new rationale for affirmative action, claiming it’s justified to correct historic wrongs.
That’s just the opposite of what Powell ruled in 1978. Roberts chastised the three dissenters sharply for it. The court “has long rejected their core thesis.”
If the liberal justices’ viewpoint ever prevails, Thomas warns, it will mean a”everyone is defined by their skin color, demanding everincreasing entitlements and preferences on that basis.” Fortunately, the Constitution and this court are standing in the way.