07/02/2023 / By Ethan Huff
It is no longer legal for college and university admissions offices to consider race as a factor in who they allow to enroll and attend classes.
The Supreme Court decided this week that “affirmative action” policies designed to admit more non-whites at institutions of higher learning are unconstitutional. In a 6-3 decision, admissions criteria across American higher education can no longer discriminate against whites.
For many decades, affirmative action was touted as a way to promote “diversity” and boost the representative share of “minorities” that appear on college and university campuses. The program specifically catered to black students, many of whom would never have been admitted based on their grades and performance had they been white.
“No longer able to give such applicants an automatic boost, admissions offices now must decide where racial diversity ranks among priorities that can include academic performance, achievement in extracurricular activities such as athletics, and preferences for alumni and donors,” reported The Wall Street Journal about the change.
(Related: In North Carolina, BlueCross BlueShield was caught discriminating against white people with its charity grant program.)
At the heart of the case were the admissions practices at two of America’s most prominent universities: Harvard College in Massachusetts and the University of North Carolina (UNC). Both schools tried to claim that a “minority” applicant’s race can and should serve as an unenumerated plus factor increasing the chance of admission.
Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who has filed many lawsuits against entities for racist policies, saw his suits against Harvard and UNC dismissed by the lower courts – but not by the Supreme Court.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution ensures that every person receives equal protection under the law, including at public universities and private universities that receive federal funding. Only in cases of specific acts of illegal discrimination are racial preferences allowed to be considered – except at colleges and universities.
For the past nearly half-century, the Supreme Court recognized a limited exception to the 14th Amendment as it pertains to school admissions.
“Diversity was a compelling interest, the court had found, and race-conscious admissions as implemented at Harvard and similar schools were narrowly tailored to avoid unnecessarily disadvantaging other applicants,” the Journal reported.
The 6-3 ruling against affirmative action would not have happened without the conservative majority that was reinforced by President Donald Trump’s three appointees, which have repeatedly expressed interest in revisiting precedents that it considers to have been wrong – Roe v. Wade is another one they overturned.
Back in 2016, an earlier case Blum sponsored was denied by the Supreme Court in a 4-3 vote. During oral arguments, however, several justices questioned whether racial quotas were really necessary to maintain “diversity” – and whether “diversity” is even something that should be strived for in the first place.
“I’ve heard the word ‘diversity,’ quite a few times, and I don’t have a clue what it means,” commented Justice Clarence Thomas at the time.
Since its initial embrace by higher education and much of corporate America, affirmative action has been seen by rational conservatives as a form of social engineering that elevates “group identity over individual achievement,” to quote the Journal.
Once the 1990s came along, numerous challenges to affirmative action arose, including a 1996 referendum in California that abolished affirmative action policies at state universities and agencies.
Then in 2003, the justices in a pair of cases struck down an undergraduate admissions formula that gave an automatic point boost ranging from 20-150 to all “minority” applicants.
Anti-white racism is a scourge that must be rooted out of America. Learn more at AntiWhite.news.
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