Affirmative In The Negative

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether or not colleges and universities can consider race at all for admissions, and it's all over but the shouting for decades of affirmative action programs in higher education. The only question is how far the Roberts Court will go in ending them, driving Black and Hispanic kids out of the top schools for a generation in both public and private universities.

The end of affirmative action, at least on college campuses, is almost certainly near.

The big picture: The Supreme Court said in 2003 that colleges and universities could consider race as a factor when deciding which students to admit, for the sake of building a diverse student body. But now, the much more conservative court appears to be changing its mind.

Driving the news: The court is set to hear oral arguments this week over the admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, both of which give a little extra weight to applicants who come from certain underrepresented groups.Life is full of surprises, but the court has sent just about every conceivable signal that it’s likely to put a stop to those sorts of policies.

Why it matters: Harvard and UNC — supported by a host of other schools, as well as business organizations — argue that diversity is essential to the educational experience and that the only effective way to ensure diversity is to make it an explicit part of the admissions process.But they’ll be making that argument to a court that is extremely skeptical of any sort of racial preference. 

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a 2007 opinion about the use of race when assigning kids to public schools. 

From voting rights to K-12 education to employment law and probably now college admissions, the court over the past several years has consistently knocked down programs that tried to correct racial inequities by explicitly taking race into account.

This is all largely one man’s doing. Conservative activist Ed Blum has organized and funded a slew of high-profile lawsuits explicitly designed to get the court to strike down affirmative action.He orchestrated a 2013 case in which a white student sued because she didn’t get into the University of Texas — and the sequel, in which the same student came back to the high court again in 2016. 

This time around, the named plaintiffs are not only white students but also Asian Americans, who say they’ve been discriminated against because of the way Harvard and UNC give preference to applications from Black and Hispanic students. 

This is not a particularly secretive endeavor. Blum is open about the fact that this is, effectively, a campaign, and that he is the campaign manager. 

"I'm a one-trick pony," Blum recently told Reuters. "I hope and care about ending these racial classifications and preferences in our public policy." 

Blum also had a hand in the landmark case that nullified a key section of the Voting Rights Act — another instance in which the conservative court said policies designed to offset a history of discrimination had outlived their usefulness.

 

The goal for Republicans and conservative millionaires and billionaires is the elimination of the Civil Rights Era and a rollback of federal protections, if not return us to the era where states can resume Jim Crow laws.in education, employment, housing, and more.

But it won't be enough to eliminate federal protections. Open, overt discrimination as "free speech" is nearing the norm. America will not survive as a country if that happens, not without massive social upheaval.