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?
For sure, a lot of it is money, but he is also on a 30+ year revenge tour right now and will seemingly vote for anything horrible. This man was one of the pioneers when it comes to burning it all down to own the libs.
He was never in it for his stated reasons. He was in it for himself. Anything he professed at the time was a strategy to gain support for more power. You can tell who is in it for themselves because they never risk their own power for a cause. The cause is the tool they use to gain power.
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.
If I suppressed your people's ability to create generational wealth for hundreds of years and suddenly stopped, would that be enough? Is everything better now? Or should you be compensated in some way?
But you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally.
The people who are already at an advantage will just continue to grow that advantage, while the people at a disadvantage will fall farther and farther behind.
That's why, despite being found repeatedly to be a form of racial discrimination, affirmative action was previously found to meet the standard of Strict Scrutiny on dozens of occasions. The Supreme Court backtracked on decades of rulings today.
You only don't like context because it, like so many things, is inconvenient to your ideology. Cant' have things like facts and nuance, no sir.
•AA benefitted white women more than all other groups COMBINED—plaintiffs never complained about that
•43% of white Harvard students are legacy or athlete students, of which 75% would not be admitted otherwise—plaintiffs never complained about that
•Asians are 6% of the population & 26% of Harvard admissions—plaintiffs never complained about that
Let's say your neighbor stole your lawn mower. You petition to the court to get it back. The court receives your request the you want your neighbor to give you the lawn mower in their possession. You would argue that the judge should only decide on whether you should get your neighbor's lawn mower while excluding the context that they stole it?
You: I want my neighbor to give me the Ryobi lawn mower in their shed.
The same reasoning worked wonders when Justice Roberts told us that racism was over and gutted the Voting Rights Act. Nothing bad came of that except rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression, and minority rule!
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.
“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.”
I don't come to the same conclusion that AA had allowed institutions of higher education to be lazy in their admissions process.
I read this excerpt to mean that now these institutions that used to have race-conscious admissions will have to go the extra mile to communicate to prospective students of color that the institution is amenable to that student's application and is interested in recruiting them despite rulings like today's from SCOTUS.
The institutions impacted by this decision are self-motivated to increase diversity because those are values established and held by those institutions. So this excerpt saying they'll have to double recruitment efforts just means that they will have to demonstrate their doors are still open to students of color despite SCOTUS barring this particular avenue in.
Removing legacy admissions would help a lot. I've seen people arguing that admissions are a zero sub game. If someone gets in because of AA then someone else didn't get in. Ending legacy admissions would free up a much larger portion of admissions for a more diverse student body to get in, instead of some rich person's dumbass kid.
Colleges give preference to legacies because the admissions department is judged by its yield (the percentage of accepted applicants who actually enroll), and legacy applicants are more likely to enroll if accepted.
It's not necessarily related to being rich. A legacy is about as likely to be wealthy as other students at the school, because after all their parents were also students at that school.
Another important reason is that colleges rely on alumni donors, and alumni are less likely to donate if their children are not accepted.
What a massive win for Asian Americans! They'll finally be allowed to apply to universities and jobs across the nation without facing legal systemic racial discrimination. I'm surprised by the negativity in here. It's 2023. It's time to end systemic racial discrimination in America.
Trying to create equitable outcomes for people who our great grandparents ripped from their home, deleted their cultural and familial history, tortured and raped them, bought and sold them as property, and forced them to work for free essentially at gunpoint, for generations, is not racism.
Words have meaning. Pushing back against the results of 400 years of systemic oppression to try to create equitable outcomes is the opposite of racism.
People like yourself don't even understand what affirmative action is in reality. Either that, or all of the talk about undeserving minorities "stealing" positions from white people is in bad faith.
The people celebrating this are celebrating that it hurts Black and Hispanic students. White kids might get helped, or might not, but that was never really the goal.
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.
Oh yeah, that's what this case has always been. Cynical conservatives used a group of well-meaning Asian students to push their hateful, bigoted agenda. Exploiting minorities is what these people do best.
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'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.
I'm not american, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I believe that being racist to fix equity is a terrible compromise. It's putting people of a certain ethnicity (white & asian) into their own little box with more competition.
Give black & hispanic people monetary aid. Aid them more in high school by assisting black majority schools. But if the system lets you say the sentence "I would have gotten into X university if I was a different race", then the system is broken.
Finally, it's not usually "black people" vs "white people", it's "poor people" vs "rich people". Black/hispanic people might be over-represented in the poor group, which is a huge problem. But aiding the poor is completely non-racist, benefits virtually everybody, and has the side effect of slowly reducing the amount of poor black/hispanic people
I'm not american, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I believe that being racist to fix equity is a terrible compromise. It's putting people of a certain ethnicity (white & asian) into their own little box with more competition.
Give black & hispanic people monetary aid. Aid them more in high school by assisting black majority schools. But if the system lets you say the sentence "I would have gotten into X university if I was a different race", then the system is broken.
Finally, it's not usually "black people" vs "white people", it's "poor people" vs "rich people". Black/hispanic people might be over-represented in the poor group, which is a huge problem. But aiding the poor is completely non-racist, benefits virtually everybody, and has the side effect of slowly reducing the amount of poor black/hispanic people.
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.
But you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally.
The people who are already at an advantage will just continue to grow that advantage, while the people at a disadvantage will fall farther and farther behind.
That's why, despite being found repeatedly to be a form of racial discrimination, affirmative action was previously found to meet the standard of Strict Scrutiny on dozens of occasions. The Supreme Court backtracked on decades of rulings today.