Back in 1993, critical race theorist Cheryl I. Harris wrote1
affirmative action does not implement a set of permanent, never-ending privileges for blacks.
What is affirmative action? What are the arguments for and against it? What was that Supreme Court ruling all about? We will cover all that and add some comic relief like the tweet below (red underline added to be acute).
Affirmative action was first used in 1935 in the Wagner Act, a federal law that gave workers the right to start and join unions. John F. Kennedy was the first president to use the term to mean advancing racial equality.
The term was originally meant to convey that the government should act affirmatively to end race and gender discrimination. But critics have equated affirmative action with racial quotas and preferences that they say give unfair advantages to people of color and discriminate against white people.
Affirmative action is defined as a set of procedures designed to; eliminate unlawful discrimination among applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future. Applicants may be seeking admission to an educational program or looking for professional employment. In modern American jurisprudence, it typically imposes remedies against discrimination on the basis of (at the very least) race, creed, color, and national origin.
Affirmative action resulted from a series of decisions following the Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. As Cornell Law University writes,
In Brown v. Board of Education, 374 U.S. 483 (1954), the Supreme Court held that public schools may not exclude minority students from white schools by sending the minority students to a school that separately services minority students. This decision acted as a precursor to many of the education-based affirmative action cases in the Supreme Court which followed in later years.
Along with other court decisions following (see affirmative action by Cornell Law University), the Brown v. Board of Education decision resulted in policies and programs that include (but are not limited to) financial aid grants to some students depending, in part, on their skin color.
One outcome of these decisions is affirmative action in educational program admissions to which we will return below.
Affirmative Action According to Critical Race Theory
Policy that strives for increased minority enrolment, activity, or membership, often with the intention of diversifying a certain environment such as a school or a workplace.
Ibram X. Kendi, one of the Biden-administration-backed critical race theorists whose ideas were put into school curricula6 discusses affirmative action in a positive light in How to Be an Antiracist7, referring to affirmative action based policies as “equalizing policies”8 and associates opposition to affirmative action as white supremacy. 9
Yet, as we’ll see, theorists like Kendi also argue against the (racial) desegregation resulting from Brown v. Board of Education. Thus, they generally argue that a black applicant should gain admission into college or be hired before a white applicant and they think that the black students and workers should be segregated from the white ones. We will return to this.
In Whiteness as Property (Harvard Law Review, 1993), Cheryl I. Harris writes,10
Affirmative action begins the essential work of rethinking rights, power, equality, race, and property from the perspective of those whose access to each of these has been limited by their oppression
and
from this perspective, affirmative action is required on both moral and legal grounds to de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness - to dismantle the actual and expected privilege that has attended "white" skin since the founding of the country.
Also,
affirmative action denies the privilege of whiteness and seeks to remove the legal protections of the existing hierarchy spawned by race oppression.
Affirmative action is based on principles of antisubordination, not priciples of black supremacy.
Usually, when we use the word equality in the context of constitutional rights, we are talking about equal protection of our rights as per the U.S. Constitution, equal treatment under under the law, equality of opportunity. Some prefer to redefine equality to mean an equal outcome despite unequal input. Some earn more and thus deserve more but receive the same as everyone else. Some call this injustice “real equality”. Harris writes12
Formal equality overlooks structural disadvantage and requires and requires mere nondiscrimination or “equal treatment” by redistributing power and resources in order to rectify inequities and to achieve real equality.
In the context of the rest of her essay, it seems like an insincere defense of affirmative action when she wrote13
affirmative action does not implement a set of permanent, never-ending privileges for blacks.
In the conclusion of Whiteness as Property, Harris writes14
It is long past time to put the property interest in whiteness to rest. Affirmative action can assist in that task.
In A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind”, Neil Gotanda complains15 that when it comes to affirmative action, many people take the color-blind position. He gives the example of the dissent of Justice Douglas in DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and elaborates16 that in the case, DeFunis, a white person, claimed that he had been denied entry into the University of Washington Law School while other students who were less qualified, minority students, were admitted. Gotanda complains,17
Justice Douglas stated unequivocally that race is an impermissible consideration in the context of college admissions:
“A DeFunis who is white is entitled to no advantage by reason of that fact; nor is he subject to any disability, no matter what his race or color. Whatever his race, he had a constitutional right to have his application considered on its individual merits in a racially neutral manner.”[165]
Consideration of past segregation by the University of Washington-indeed, any consideration of this country's history of oppression at all-is impermissible. Justice Douglas's philosophy remains alive on the Court today; Justice Scalia quoted Douglas' dissent with approval in his City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. concurrence. [166]
Whatever the validity in 1896 of Justice Harlan's comment in Plessy-that "our Constitution is ... color-blind"--the concept is inadequate to deal with today's racially stratified, culturally diverse, and economically divided nation.
goal is to develop in the specific context of law school affirmative action the conception of “race-consciousness” which Gary Peller describes
in his essay Race Consciousness,22 As I explain in the forthcoming section on race consciousness in the Culture War Encyclopedia, race consciousness is the opposite of being color-blind (not judging people by the color of their skin).
Duncan calls society's concept of merit in academia (a system in which one gets what one earns)23
the fetishistic, neurotic and just plain irrational attitude toward "standards" and merit-based "entitlement" that prevails in legal academia.
He argues for redefining merit to mean some combination of race + merit in some ratio. This, it seems, is why he uses the term “color-blind meritocratic fundamentalism” to refer to merit rather than “merit”. One might fairly argue that redefining merit as merit plus race is like redefining racism as racism plus power.
experience as a white male ruling-class child who got good grades, gained admission to one elite institution after another, and then landed a job and eventually tenure at Harvard Law School.
a sense of shame and guilt at living in unjust, segregated racial privilege
which, taken along with his argument in favor of race based affirmative action, adds up to something like, “I achieved success through merit but black people need affirmative action to achieve success. Also, I am ashamed that, being a white male, I am superior to black people and women.”
More insight into Duncan is provided by the passage where he writes that our society should be one that30
deliberately structures institutions so that communities and social classes share wealth and power.
In the conclusion, Duncan Kennedy writes31 that their proposal is
a kind of cultural proportional representation in the exercise of ideological power through legal academia
will arise out of guilt, anger, mistrust, cynicism, bitter conflict, and a great deal of confusion and contradiction - if it arises at all - and it would be, to my mind, the more wonderful for it.
I want to say self-loathing elitist communist with a sense of racial superiority and with a white-savior complex.
There are various forms of dishonesty. Lying by omission is one of them. What all these critical race theorists leave out of their definitions and discussions of affirmative action, at least in the case of college admissions is its racist aspects as explained in the next section.
Affirmative action within education is perhaps the best potential example of woke meddling in what would otherwise at least generally be a meritocratic system. It is fairly self evident the harm that is done by this educational premise; people who are qualified for skilled work are potentially prevented from doing that work because others artificially jump the line ahead of them based solely on their skin color, gender or socioeconomic background. Those who jump the line are similarly harmed (although this concept gets little attention!) As people are placed in employment roles, and so forth, which they are not qualified for, inevitably experiencing more difficulty with upward mobility once they enter the marginally more-meritocratic corporate construct.
The woke adjust for this concept by attempting to inject the same concept into the job site. That the business tends to promote people because of their performance is seen as problematic to the woke, and so is taken as evidence that the job site is racist or misogynistic - this is not actually the case; in large part the phenomenon can be explained by wokeness itself at the educational level. I have seen pitifully few people address this elephant in the room, either out of fear of being called “bigoted”(which is ironic)or because they have not deduced this all-too-obvious and self evident fact.
In this way wokeness shows its socialistic origins, The concept of the meritocratic structure is weakened and eventually abandoned in the form of appeasing a howling mob of people whose entire existence revolves around pretending to be outraged at “injustice” - and pretense it normally is, for the aggrieved parties are rather scant in voicing their grievance, as others do it on their behalf, speaking for the downtrodden while rather often coming from relatively comfortable college-educated and normally largely white backgrounds - and white people, wokeness argues, cannot be an aggrieved party. This is compensated for by the ever present excuse of trying to uplift others while actually helping to strangulate them.
This same bigoted woke construct for example acts in a reductionist manner, depriving all individual achievement away from, say, a black student with a 4.0 GPA who managed to grab up a masters’ degree in bioengineering from an Ivy league school - a deprivation in which those who criticize wokeness all too often assume that individual was gifted their position solely because of affirmative action - the woke agree, and staunchly defend, oddly, the same basic position. There is no methodology within this framework by which the black student can individually claim merit - on the one hand because of people who refuse to acknowledge it, and on the other because of the rest who do the same for different reasons.
colorblindness as a solution to the issue of actual is, I claim, self evident. The claim of Martin Luther King that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, is both an enlightened and libertarian statement. This is a statement which CRT proponents want us to discount as unhelpful. I reject their premise; but their premise is based explicitly on Marxism. There must under such systems be an us and a them - A hierarchical power dynamic needs to exist or else the “utopian goals” of Marxism have been largely fulfilled anyway and there is no need for left wing provocations.
Rather than fixate on the usefulness of colorblidness as we can simply consider the uselessness of the CRT-derived counterpart. To my knowledge not one person had been uplifted by the message if their Marxist screed. The color of their skin does not matter; no non-white individual will ever have their life improved by Marxism or similar systems because the entire end goal of such systems has nothing to do with improving anyone’s’ lives. Indeed, abuse and excess are he fruits of the labor of leftism.
Mainstream Argument for & Against Affirmative Action
If a college can admit 1 student and they have 3 applicants; the 1st being black who scored 97%, the 2nd being white who scored 98% and the 3rd being Asian-American who scored 99%, they will admit the 1st, the black student with the lower score, because of affirmative action.
If a black job applicant, a white job applicant and an Asian-American applicant apply for the same position and their resume’s are equally meritorious, affirmative action dictates that the black applicant should get the job because of affirmative action.
The standard rebuttal to this criticism is that because of racism and economic inequality, black students are disadvantaged. To balance things, this sort of affirmative action for schools and workplaces are needed. Critical race theorists or ‘crits’ as they call themselves generally agree with (race based) affirmative action.37 Not all ‘crits’ agree on this aspect of affirmative action.
There are some critical race theorists who argue for class based affirmative action rather than race based affirmative action. For the most part, they respond that when faced with the choice of admitting a poor black student with a certain score or an equally poor white student with the same score or a student with a higher score, the poor black student should be chosen over the poor white student because white people are all already advantaged with inherent white privilege (due to, for example, implicit and unconscious bias38 ) even if they don’t have institutional privilege.39
Some argue that affirmative action is unfair to Asian and Jewish students40 who tend to have higher scores. The response from crits is that Asians and Jews tend to score higher than whites but that black students tend to score lower and therefore the SATs are unfair to black students and therefore affirmative action is right.41
As we can see, for the most part, critical race theory agrees with this argument taken by the mainstream liberal side on this aspect of affirmative action.
The liberal side with which CRT generally agrees, of course, takes the view that all black people live under the same conditions, all white people live under the same conditions, all Asian-Americans live under the same conditions and so on. This is, of course, stereotyping. This fails to treat individuals as people. It treats you as if you are just part of a collective.
Also, even if one accepts the collectivist view at the expense of individuals, affirmative action is unfair, for example, to Asian Americans collectively. also, if white institutional racism gives an unfair advantage to whites over others, why would Asian Americans on average get higher scores and why would white students take a back seat to black students when they have the same scores? Things do not add up.
scholars say the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action policies are white women, from college campuses to the American workplace.
White women today are more educated and make up a bigger slice of the workforce as a result of decades of affirmative action policies, scholars say. White women have also made inroads into corporate leadership that people of color and women of color have not…
Discussions about affirmative action tend to focus on race, but statistics show that it also has been an equalizer for white women in education and in the workplace.
A Labor Department report in 1995 found that since the 1960s, affirmative action had helped 5 million members of minority groups and 6 million women move up in the workplace.
Supporters of affirmative action protest near the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Capitol Hill on June 29, 2023 in Washington, DC. In a 6-3 vote, Supreme Court Justices ruled that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, setting precedent for affirmative action in other universities and colleges. Anna Moneymaker, Getty Images.
“When we talk about institutions like higher education, we see that women in general are on par with men but we have severe underrepresentation of Black, indigenous and Latinx folks in colleges and universities and even greater disparities for women of color,” Texas A&M sociologist and lawyer Wendy Leo Moore told USA TODAY. “You can make the same analysis when we look at employment. Those are the kinds of things that indicate that on a structural level that white women have benefited.”
What does affirmative action data show?
In the last six decades, women have leapfrogged men in earning four-year degrees while Black and Latino students are still underrepresented in college admissions and graduation rates, especially in four-year colleges.
A similar trend has been seen in the workplace, according to a USA TODAY analysis of named executives at the nation's 100 largest companies.
From 2020 to 2022, white women expanded their share of senior leadership jobs at twice the rate of women of color, though women remained outnumbered to 1. Despite marginal gains among men of color, white men still hold about two-thirds of the top jobs even though they account for just one-third of U.S. workers.
Why do most white women oppose affirmative action?
If white women benefit from affirmative action, why do they oppose it?
Half of Americans do not approve of colleges and universities considering race in admissions, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. A majority of white adults disapprove of it, too. Some 70% of non-Hispanic white women somewhat or strongly oppose affirmative action, according to a 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions, eliminating the principal tool the nation’s most exclusive schools have used to diversify their campuses.
the Supreme Court decision striking down racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions
claiming that the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina
could lead to an admissions system that is even more subjective and mysterious, as colleges try to follow the law but also admit a diverse class of students.
Officials at some universities predicted that there would be less emphasis on standardized metrics like test scores and class rank, and more emphasis on personal qualities, told through recommendations and the application essay — the opposite of what many opponents of affirmative action had hoped for.
“Will it become more opaque? Yes, it will have to,” said Danielle Ren Holley, who is about to take over as president of Mount Holyoke College. “It’s a complex process, and this opinion will make it even more complex.”
"The Supreme Court decision on college and university admissions will change how we pursue the educational benefits of diversity–but our commitment to that work remains steadfast."
Edward Blum, the founder and president of Students for Fair Admissions
who, they report,
promised to enforce the decision, saying that Students for Fair Admissions and its counsel “have been closely monitoring potential changes in admissions procedures.”
“We remain vigilant and intend to initiate litigation should universities defiantly flout this clear ruling,” he wrote in a statement on Thursday.
In the opinion that broke along ideological lines, conservative justices invalidated admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, ruling they did not comply with the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas read his concurring opinion from the bench, a rare occurrence for him, and advocated for a colorblind view of the Constitution. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, meanwhile, read a blistering dissent from the bench.
on the majority/conservative side of the rift and reported that on the dissenting/liberal side, Justice Sotomayor made, as we will see ahead,
a rare move that signals profound disagreement.
Again, according to these reports, we have Justices making rare moves to underscore their disagreement with each other on this contention. The New York Times added that Justice Sotomayor stated in her written dissent,
“The court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,”
They wrote in the same report,
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent.
“The Harvard and U.N.C. admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the equal protection clause,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points.”
They wrote that in summarizing her dissent in person from the bench, Justice Sotomayor made
a rare move that signals profound disagreement.
“The court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society,” she said in her written dissent.
Further on, they report,
“At bottom,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “the six unelected members of today’s majority upend the status quo based on their policy preferences about what race in America should be like, but is not, and their preferences for a veneer of colorblindness in a society where race has always mattered and continues to matter in fact and in law.”
They also report of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. that
The point, he said, was that applicants must be assessed individually. “In other words,” he wrote, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.”
Justice Sotomayor said that was thin gruel.
“This supposed recognition that universities can, in some situations, consider race in application essays is nothing but an attempt to put lipstick on a pig,” she wrote.
Also,
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the chief justice’s majority opinion. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Justice Sotomayor’s dissent.
In all, six justices issued opinions, collectively spanning more than 200 pages notable for sometimes harsh language and starkly differing accounts of the nation’s history and the role race plays in contemporary society.
The two sides, for instance, offered competing understandings of the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education, the towering 1954 decision that barred racial segregation in public schools. The lesson of Brown, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, was that “the time for making distinctions based on race had passed.”
Justice Sotomayor said the decision stood for a different principle and accused the majority of engaging in revisionist history. “Brown was,” she wrote, “a race-conscious decision that emphasized the importance of education in our society.”
She added: “At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, and as Brown recognized, the 14th Amendment was intended to undo the effects of a world where laws systematically subordinated Black people and created a racial caste system. Brown and its progeny recognized the need to take affirmative, race-conscious steps to eliminate that system.”
Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s Black members, traded particularly sharp barbs.
“As she sees things,” Justice Thomas wrote of Justice Jackson, “we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today.”
Justice Jackson responded that her colleague’s “prolonged attack responds to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions program that is not the one U.N.C. has crafted,” adding that “Justice Thomas’s opinion also demonstrates an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or U.N.C.’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.”
She said she would not engage on every one of his points, as “Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here.” (Justice Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, having served on one of the university’s governing boards.)
They also report,
In the North Carolina case, the plaintiffs said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.
The case against Harvard has an additional element, accusing the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.
Lawyers for Harvard said the challengers had relied on a flawed statistical analysis and denied that the university discriminated against Asian American applicants. More generally, they said race-conscious admissions policies were lawful.
This New York Times piece concludes,
For her part, Justice Sotomayor struck a defiant note.
“The pursuit of racial diversity will go on,” she wrote. “Although the court has stripped out almost all uses of race in college admissions, universities can and should continue to use all available tools to meet society’s needs for diversity in education. Despite the court’s unjustified exercise of power, the opinion today will serve only to highlight the court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.”
In a different piece, focusing on this cultural split among the Supreme Court Justices, the New York Times reported in In Affirmative Action Ruling, Black Justices Take Aim at Each Other, subheadlined, Even as Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to agree over the policy’s aim, they harshly criticized each other’s conclusions on what to do,
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation through its ruling.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In an extraordinary exchange that played out among the pages of a landmark decision by the Supreme Court declaring race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities across the nation unlawful, two Black justices battled over the merits of affirmative action.
In sharp rebuttals, Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson harshly criticized each other’s perspectives, reflecting the deep divisions and passions Americans have over the practice. Even as they appeared to agree over the policy’s aim — remedying the longstanding discrimination and segregation of Black Americans — they drew opposite conclusions on how and what to do.
They write that Justice Thomas criticized Justice Jackson at length in his concurring opinion
singling out her views on race and leveling broader criticisms of liberal support for affirmative action.
“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today,” he wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Jackson pointedly pushed back, denouncing his remarks as a “prolonged attack” that responded “to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions program that is not the one U.N.C. has crafted.”
She agreed that the pair did not disagree on the history or facts about racial disparities in the United States, but that they had reached totally different conclusions. Justice Thomas “is somehow persuaded that these realities have no bearing on a fair assessment of ‘individual achievement,” she wrote, adding that he “ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish.”
Their responses in effect amounted to a fight over the lasting legacy of racism and continued discrimination — and how best to address it.
Justice Thomas castigated Justice Jackson’s backing of affirmative action, describing it as a panacea where society would “unquestioningly accede to the view of elite experts and reallocate society’s riches by racial means as necessary to ‘level the playing field.’”
Although he acknowledged that “our society is not, and has never been, colorblind,” he deemed wealth gaps between Black and white Americans “constitutionally irrelevant.” In Justice Jackson’s view, he wrote, “almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race.”
He then hit on a recurring theme in his writings and speeches over the years: his anger at Black people being portrayed as victims.
He repudiated statistics showing that the average white family makes much more than the average Black family, arguing that such figures unfairly portray Black people as a monolith.
“This lore is not and has never been true,” he wrote. “Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color.”
He cited a 2016 book by Thomas Sowell, an economist and prominent Black conservative who has influenced Justice Thomas’s philosophy, and he accused Justice Jackson of using “broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth and well-being to label all Blacks as victims.”
He continued, “I cannot deny the great accomplishments of Black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds.”
Justice Jackson’s viewpoint, he said, would keep Black people locked into “a seemingly perpetual inferior caste.” He called that “an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”
He also wrote that she was drawing on “race-based stereotypes,” when, in reality, “all racial groups are heterogeneous, and Blacks are no exception — encompassing Northerners and Southerners, rich and poor, and recent immigrants and descendants of slaves.”
By “articulating her black-and-white world (literally),” he added, Justice Jackson ignored the experiences of other groups, including Chinese immigrants, descendants of Holocaust survivors and those who came to the United States from Ireland, fleeing famine.
Justice Jackson pushed back sharply against Justice Thomas, accusing him of imagining her viewpoint and misunderstanding the underpinnings of her support for the policy.
“Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth and well-being of American citizens,” she wrote. Although those disparities emerged years ago, she added, ignoring that history would be foolish because those inequities have “indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.”
Offering a brief history of Jim Crow and the Great Migration, Justice Jackson laid out how Black families struggled against a legal system aimed at preventing them from building wealth — and focused on the strength and fortitude they showed.
“Despite these barriers, Black people persisted,” she wrote.
She invoked the concept of the pink elephant paradox, the idea that once you try not to think about something, it becomes impossible to stop thinking about it. “The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great nation’s full potential.”
For decades, the Supreme Court recognized a college’s freedom to decide how to build a diverse student body and provide opportunity.
Today, the Court walked away from precedent, effectively ending affirmative action in higher education.
I strongly disagree with this decision.
As if he is qualified or even cognitively able to assess the court’s reasoning and ruling, Biden said the Supreme Court has gone rogue according to the Hill,
“This is not a normal court,” the president said at the White House when asked whether thought the institution had gone “rogue.”
Also,
“We’re not going to let this break us,” Biden said on Thursday, vowing to discuss the decision and next steps further.
Today’s decision promotes the lie that success is the result only of individual choices and the lie that social structures have no bearing on success. Affirmative action does not admit unqualified students; it makes sure qualified students are not wrongly denied, and it says you cannot have an institution that benefits from the tax dollars of all people and use those resources to perpetuate the social advantage caused by past discrimination.
Alexandria Occasio-Cortez Puts Her Hoof in Her Mouth
Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, AOC tweeted,
Oh my! Such innocent stupidity!
Readers can be excused if they do not know the following because, I assume, none of you are congress members; the Supreme Court can only rule on cases that come before them after working their way up through the lower circuit courts. In other words, Cortez, that’s not how the Supreme Court works and it is shocking that you, a member of congress, are so incompetent that you don’t know that and so unwise that you thought it would be a good idea to tweet what you did and have yet to take it down as I write this on July 30, 2023!
She would be a harmless but amusing little clown were it not for the political power she has. She’s like a toddler at the wheel of an attack helicopter. She’s like Beavis or Butthead with congressional power. Funny but dangerous. Shouldn’t she have handlers to prevent her from tweeting such stupid thoughts?
Here is some of what I have thus far written in the entry on critical race theory for the Culture War Encyclopedia about the crits’ views on the racial desegregation resulting from Brown v. Board of Education,
view that a minority group should give priority to its own affairs and interests first.
They mean white nationalism, black nationalism and so on. This is also known as ethnonationalism. They write that some critical race theorists are assimilationists while others are nationalists who44
are apt to describe themselves as a nation within a nation and to hold that the loyalty and identification of black people, for example, should lie with that community and only secondarily with the United States.
They write45 that critical race theorists who take the nationalist view which includes calling for all black schools, all Latino schools. They also write46 that
Latino nationalists also endorse preservation of the Spanish language and ties with Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean or other homelands. A few speak of restoring what is now the U. S. Southwest to something like it previous condition - the mythical land of Aztlan.
Both Latino and black nationalists take a dim view or passing - the effort to deracinate oneself and present oneself as white. Latino nationalists usually reject the term “Hispanic” because of its association with Spain, the nation that oppressed their ancestors in Mexico and Central and South America. Nationalists honor ethnic studies and history as vital disciplines and loo with skepticism on members of their groups who date, marry, or form close friendships with whites or seek employment in white-dominated workplaces or industries.
The authors go over some intermediary positions on this contention.47
So, again, they want the tax payer to pay to send applicant to college over an other based on skin color and they want stundents to go to racially segregated schools in a racially segregated society.
Harris, Cheryl I. - Whiteness as Property (originally published in June 10, 1993, Harvard Law Review Volume 106, Number 8). Also printed in a revised form in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings(copyright 1995, the New Press), pages 176-291.
Kendi, Ibram X. - How to be an Antiracist(copyright 2019, Ibram X. Kendi; published by One World, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)
multiple authors, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings(copyright 1995, the New Press), pages 159-177
Richard Delgado is John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama and one of the founders of critical race theory. His books include The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader (co-edited with Jean Stefancic; New York University Press) and The Rodrigo Chronicles (New York University Press
Here are the results from Google Scholar for Richard Delgado…
Jean Stefancic is Professor and Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama School of Law. Her books include No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda and How Lawyers Lose Their Way: A Profession Fails Its Creative Minds.
Here are the results from Google Scholar for Jean Stefancic…
Pages 20, 27, 123, 130, 132 in Kendi, Ibram X. - How to be an Antiracist(copyright 2019, Ibram X. Kendi; published by One World, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)
Page 159, multiple authors, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas) - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings (copyright 1995, the New Press)
originally published 1990 in the Duke Law Journal 758-847 (1990), also published in multiple authors, forward by Cornel West, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendell Thomas - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings (copyright 1995, the New Press), pages 127-158
