US supreme court rules against affirmative action in Harvard and UNC cases

Clarence Thomas is one of the more startling examples of the "fuck you, I got mine" generation. How do you go from being in the black panthers to this?

Edit: Grammar

Oh good, they finally legally mandated color blindness. Historic and pervasive systemic racism is solved once and for all thanks to the Supreme Court issuing an edict that it shouldn't exist. Huzzah!

They should legally mandate the nonexistence of poverty next. They can solve all the problems America has in a few weeks this way.

Probably going to get downvoted for this, but I tend to agree that AA, as it stood, had run its course. Getting rid of it now clears the way for new and better solutions.

When I read these excerpts from this article https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-action/ - I get a strong sense that AA really just allowed schools to be lazy.

“Universities all across the country will begin to experiment with a whole variety of admissions techniques that are race-neutral in the sense that race is not an explicit factor, but not race-neutral in the sense that they’re intended to produce diversity,” says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.

Paul says many universities are going to have to up their recruitment efforts, increase partnerships with community colleges and high-poverty high schools, and invest more in scholarships and financial aid.

“These are things that universities will want to do anyway, because they’re good things to do,” Paul says.

Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court, says the ruling means that universities will have to redouble their efforts to maintain diverse student bodies. Urman says there are examples of states opting out of affirmative action policies to mixed results.

“My home state of California abolished affirmative action in 1996 in a vote called Proposition 209, and California universities spent a lot of time and resources recruiting, establishing programs,” he says. “They were able to get diversity, not back to where it was before … but let’s say they were able to avoid some of the worst predictions of what would happen to diversity.”

One potential solution to maintain diversity are so-called percentage plans, where students who graduate at the top of their classes at each respective high school are guaranteed spots in universities. The first percentage plan was signed into law in 1997 in Texas by then-Gov. George W. Bush. It permits any student from “a Texas public high school in the top 10% of his or her class to get into any Texas public college, without any SAT or ACT score.”

Yeah, par for the course the current POS SCOTUS.

Took them long enough to make racial discrimination illegal for college admissions.

Some of the people celebrating this have the notion that it will primarily help white kids. I suspect these people will be in for a rude awakening.

An analysis of student records by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative activist group representing Asian American students in the lawsuit against Harvard, found that the institution, on average, rated Asian American applicants lower in personality and likability ratings than others.<

I didn't see that approach coming, but I guess I should have. Conservatives have always argued that affirmative action was racist, but racist against white folks. Now they've found a non-white group that they could argue was discriminated against based on race.

I'm sure everyone supporting this decision is also for making legacy admissions, college prep, and AP courses illegal too. Or is it only racist when the outcome favors people of color?

I have mixed feelings about this ruling.

Affirmative action was trying to compensate for implicit anti-minority bias with explicit pro-minority bias. Today in many places, Republicans have outlawed even teaching people that this implicit bias exists with their war on critical race theory. There's a troubling recent resurgence of open racism on the right. We clearly haven't fixed the problem.

And yet, fighting institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism seems very hypocritical to me. It's much like how murder is illegal yet many states implement the death penalty. If we want our society to be a meritocracy we shouldn't grant opportunities based on the intersection of socioeconomics and genetics. This would presumably lead to a system where political and ethnic groups fight over which groups are disadvantaged and by how much, and whom the rules should favor, if it hasn't already, (the arguments made regarding Asian applicants presented in this case seem a lot like this.)

Clearly some groups were directly historically disadvantaged by the state, most notably African Americans and Native Americans. The government that did this to them should have responsibility for the consequences of these injustices, and not unrelated universities. If we are to target aid in a racial way it would make sense to do it as reparations targeted at the groups that were disadvantaged in a racial way, rather than forcing colleges to abandon meritocracy. If anything I want colleges to be more meritocratic, to the point of no longer letting people in for being legacies or donors.

Although racial disparities aren't fixed, addressing it this way is illegal and problematic. It seems the only viable alternative left to address remaining social inequities is to elevate all socioeconomically disadvantaged people in a colorblind way.

As for colleges, if they want to avoid racial bias they could omit racial identifiers and correlates like the name and location of the applicant and choose their students in a truly colorblind and meritocratic way, because without such identifiers implicit biases can't be expressed.

Well I didnt want do this but Im calling kangaroo court.

I'm not a fan of this ruling. Not on the merits, but on the results.

Affirmative Action fell into the "Equity" column in that "Equality - Equity - Justice" spectrum. Remember that comic with the baseball game, a fence, and 3 kids of varying heights trying to watch?

Equality says they can all go to the fence and try to watch, and everyone gets a box to stand on, though, even with the box, the shortest kid can't see over the fence.

Equity says that everyone gets boxes of varying heights so they can all see over the fence.

Justice advocates replacing the fence with a chain-link fence tat everyone can see through without the need for boxes in the first place.

It's nice to pretend that we don't need boxes, and racism is "over", but that's just pretending.