A year after its historic reversal on abortion, the very conservative Supreme Court has ended affirmative action programs at the university. A decision that will reduce the proportion of black and Hispanic students.
It’s a new 180-degree turn, a new historic step backwards for many progressives, and certainly a very powerful new symbol from the benches of the Supreme Court, now firmly padlocked by American conservatives. A year after the repeal of federal abortion laws, which sparked helpless outrage among a majority of Americans, the US Supreme Court on Thursday ended university funding programs.
Contrary to the opinion of the three progressives, its six conservative judges ruled that campus admissions procedures based on the color or ethnic origin of the candidates were unconstitutional.
Many universities “have mistakenly assumed that the basis of a person’s identity is not their credentials, skills acquired, or knowledge gained, but the color of their skin.” Our constitutional history does not condone that,” wrote the President (“Chief Justice”). of the Court, Judge John Roberts, representing the majority. “In other words, the student should be treated on the basis of their individual experiences, not on racial criteria,” he adds.
In her dissenting opinion, Barack Obama-appointed progressive justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized that “equal educational opportunities” are “a prerequisite for the realization of racial equality in our country.” Today, “this court draws on decades of jurisprudence and immense advances” and “establishes an artificial rule of indifference to race as a constitutional principle in a highly segregated society where the issue of race has always been important and will continue to be so,” claims they also.
neo-conversation activist
Several highly selective universities had introduced racial and ethnic criteria into their admissions procedures in the late 1960s to correct inequalities resulting from the United States’ segregationist past and to increase the proportion of black, Hispanic, or Native American students in their enrollment. Dubbed ‘positive discrimination’, these measures have historically been heavily criticized in conservative circles for being opaque and ‘reverse racism’.
The Supreme Court, which has been referred to on several occasions since 1978, had banned quotas but always authorized universities to take racial criteria into account, among other things. So far, she has considered striving for more diversity on campus to be “legitimate,” even if it violates the principle of equality for all American citizens.
This Thursday’s verdict, which will force American universities to review their admissions procedures, stems from a 2014 complaint filed against the oldest private and public universities in the United States, Harvard and North Carolina. At the head of a group called Students for Fair Admission, a neocon activist, Edward Blum, had accused them of discriminating against Asian students. The latter, whose academic performance is well above average, would be more numerous on campus if their performance was the sole selection criterion, he argued.
After suffering multiple defeats in court, he turned to the Supreme Court, which ironically has never been more diverse than it is today, with two African American judges and one Hispanic judge. But the Supreme Court was fundamentally transformed by Donald Trump and now has six out of nine conservative justices, including African-American Justice Clarence Thomas, an advocate of affirmative action programs that he nonetheless benefited from to study at the prestigious Yale University.
“Deliberate ignorance of our reality”
The administration of Democratic President Joe Biden had advocated the status quo in vain. “The future of our country depends on its ability to have leaders with different profiles, capable of leading an increasingly diverse society,” his representative said. Likewise, large companies, including Apple, General Motors, Accenture or Starbucks, had pointed out that “a diverse workforce improves their performance” and that they “rely on schools across the country to train their future employees”.
Contrasted with federal abortion rights, which a large majority of Americans support, affirmative action in college admission has further divided public opinion. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, half of Americans say they disapprove of considering race and ethnicity in college admissions decisions, while a third support the practice.
However, the survey in question precisely shows significant disparities by racial and ethnic criteria. Majorities of white and Asian adults disapprove of affirmative action, while black Americans overwhelmingly support them and Hispanics are divided.
In a statement released minutes after the Supreme Court ruling, the leading black American rights organization, the NAACP, expressed dismay: “In a society still scarred by the wounds of racial inequality, the Supreme Court has shown a willful ignorance of our reality.”