Elie Mystal: The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. [View all]

[In It to Win It]

The Nation

Archived: https://archive.ph/qv6uS

It has been a long goodbye. The Supreme Court declared race consciousness in college admissions, also known as affirmative action, unconstitutional today. The vote was predictable, 6-3, with all the justices appointed by Republican presidents standing together to revoke the policy. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts himself, who ruled that affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was, of course, written explicitly to revoke the racism practiced by whites against Blacks through their slaver’s constitution, but Roberts doesn’t care about all that. His opinion attempts to capture the 14th Amendment and redeploy it to justify a white version of “colorblindness” that just so happens to lock in a status quo that benefits whites.

Like last year’s revocation of reproductive rights in Dobbs v. Jackson, the decision today, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, achieves a long-standing conservative policy goal through the fiat of six unelected Supreme Court justices. Conservatives have been gunning for affirmative action since the policy was reintroduced in the 1960s (it had previously been used during Reconstruction and conservatives killed it then too). Today is a victory for the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the entire conservative legal establishment that has correctly identified the courts as the way to reverse policies they don’t like.

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved merely through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While conservatives on the Supreme Court delivered the fatal blow, the policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into whatever “elite” school they were hoping for. If you want to make an immigrant family adopt a Klansman’s view of the intelligence, culture, and work ethic of Black folks, tell them that their kid’s standardized test scores are not enough to guarantee entry into ivy-draped halls of power. Some of the most horribly racist claptrap folks have felt comfortable saying to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don’t like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow “unearned” because they were “given” to me by affirmative action.

That last bit is in some ways the most devastating: Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I’ve had white folks whom I could standardize test into a goddamn coma tell me that I only got into school because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy—whose parents’ name was on one of the buildings on campus—who asked me how it felt to know I got “extra help” to get in. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping.

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