Action Packed

The Scotus decision re Affirmative Action was just one of a trio of rulings where the six Justices appointed by Republican Presidents used illogical and tendentious thinking to arrive at their preferred ideological outcomes.  They ruled it “unconstitutional” to use race as even just ONE of a range of factors in the delicate issue of college admission.  

The practice, labeled “Affirmative Action,” had, over the past several decades, greatly increased the number of Black and Hispanic enrollees at America’s most selective colleges and universities.  This had the highly beneficial, not-so-incidental effects of dramatically increasing minority representation in such professions as law, medicine, finance and journalism.  

However, this further had the inevitable effect of reducing the former 90+% of spots taken up by white non-Hispanics to something closer to their 60% of the overall population. This struck some white male ideologues as an unacceptable incursion on their God-given dominance. 

Of course they were far too clever than to storm the gates of Academia hoisting signs demanding “More whites, please.” So they used Asians as their preferred stalking horse, claiming that strict adherence to anything other than pure EPA’s and test scores meant unfair—indeed unconstitutional—harm to Asians. 

The numerical realities of the standards for college admissions meant that strict reliance on performance metrics, with no portion of the judging allocated to any more subjective factors such as extra-curriculars or “personality,” would reduce the members admitted of certain ethnic groups—particularly Asians and not-so-incidentally whites. 

Arguing that Asians were effectively discriminated against by any attempts to increase Black and Hispanic enrollment allowed the white plaintiffs to avoid revealing that they were seeking to maintain the long-established advantages held by whites, white men in particular. The lead plaintiff in the Affirmative Action case the Court agreed to review—one Edward Blum—was in my view thus able to cloak his overt pro-white stance with the appearance of favoring a different racial minority—Asians.  

This sophistry was only too eagerly embraced by the six Justices who had been appointed by Republican Presidents. FIVE of them came to the Court courtesy of GOP Presidents who had never received an actual popular vote majority.  This might seem a coincidence, as might the fact that ALL six members of that unbreakable Right-wing majority are Roman Catholics.  Might to some, but not to me.  

But the raw politics of Affirmative Action strongly suggest that there is not a majority of voters who wish to see it preserved.  A majority of Americans have NOT attended college, and certainly not the elite institutions at the core of this issue.  Indeed most of the country’s college attendees went to non-selective schools where none of this is an issue.

Further, there is at least a superficial appeal to the Right’s argument that the way to end racial discrimination is to END racial discrimination on any basis.  There is in my opinion a reasonable “slippery slope” argument to be made against using race as an overt factor in college admissions.  Substituting preference to those candidates who can show they have been economically disadvantaged is an available alternative that doesn’t bring the toxic politics of race bubbling to the surface, one that IMHO Democrats should grab on to post haste.

That tiresome old saw about real estate—location, location and location—has a striking correlative about America: race, race and race.  Scratch below the surface of nearly any issue bedeviling American politics and I believe race will rapidly bubble up to the surface.  

Cong. Kweisi Mfume, on MSNBC on Sunday, offered this brutal but I think essentially accurate assessment of America: “A nation built on race, conceived in hypocrisy, and dedicated to the false proposition that white men were superior to all others.”  He further delineated America’s racial underpinnings in these words:  “A country built on the enslavement of the negro, the annexation of the Hispanic and the extermination of the Native American.”

The spate of Supreme Court rulings on Affirmative Action, on Student Loan forgiveness and on an LGBTQ issue ALL had the not-so-accidental effect of diminishing opportunities for ethnic and sexual minorities and preserving the pride of place enjoyed in America in these matters by white males since the founding of Harvard in 1636.

MLK’s famous arc of justice had been slowly bending in a more favorable direction.  But with these decisions, six Supreme Court Justices have thrown that arc into reverse, at least for now.  It will take many years and monumental effort by millions of good Americans to reverse the effects of what these six benighted jurists have done this week.