The Supreme Court was right to end affirmative action - Worthie Springer
On Thursday 29th June 2023, the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina deemed affirmative action unconstitutional and has forbidden race from being considered as a factor in college admissions.
The Supreme Court delivered the biggest win for colourblindness in decades. As you would expect, this decision by the court has caused a lot of controversies, and the backlash has all the alarmism and hyperbole that you'd expect.
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has said that "the Supreme Court has thrown into question their own legitimacy" and called the decision a backlash to progress.". Al Sharpton said the decision was "tantamount to sticking a dagger in our back." The head of the National Education Association said that the appropriate news headline for the decision was "access and opportunity denied." Ibram X Kendi said "race-neutral is the new separate but equal" and The View's Whoopi Goldberg asked, "is this leading to no women in colleges soon?" All of this is nonsense. America is not going to hell as a consequence of the Court's decision. On the contrary, this is actually a step towards the right direction and the best path forward for a multiethnic nation like the U.S.
When the ethos of affirmative action was designed, it was intended as a form of reparations to African-Americans to ameliorate the societal effects of discrimination and to begin a process of atoning for the country's long history of mistreatment towards African-Americans. However, as the years passed, as the nation's demographics changed, and as the issue went before the courts, the justificatory narrative underlying affirmative action changed. From a narrative about redressing the wrongs of history to one principally about creating and ensuring diversity on college campuses and in the corporate world. This changing of the narrative underscores one of the huge flaws with affirmative action. That it is a policy of its time, that's no longer needed.
Like house phones, typewriters, or expired milk, affirmative action is no longer fit for purpose. When affirmative action was made, African-Americans constituted the biggest minority in the US. Now, that place has been taken by Hispanics who in the 1960s, only made up one percent of the population. Asian Americans were nowhere near the 24 million strong that they are today, which ironically, is greater than the number of African Americans that were here in the 1960s. Given this context, it's no wonder the narrative, and the application of affirmative action have changed. Like a rubber band being stretched to the point of explosion, affirmative action is being stretched to do more, and to cover more groups than it was originally intended for.
The responses that have been elicited from the court's decision are unfortunately wrong and misguided in their passion, and flawed in their outlook. To the proponents of affirmative action, the policy of affirmative action is a policy that our nation cannot live without. They believe that diversity cannot be achieved in its absence, and think now that it's gone, black and Hispanic kids will no longer have the opportunity to catch up with their white peers. This reasoning leaves a lot to be desired.
Why should a policy that was meant to be a temporary remedial measure now become a permanent piece of American policy? Is America in 2023 so racist that blacks and Hispanics cannot make it into elite schools without their race being taken under consideration? How is it that black people were able to infiltrate sports without affirmative action, and how were Asians able to penetrate in large numbers classical music without the assistance of affirmative action? Can blacks and Hispanics not do the same with academics in 2023? Why, in a country with a labour force, a cultural landscape, and a government that is more diverse than ever before, need to continue using affirmative action?
We must recognise that the America of today is much different from the America of 1970. I live in a world where I, as a blind Black man, am writing for a magazine helmed by a Black woman. My vice-president is half Jamaican and half Indian. When I was ten, I saw Obama get elected, and four years later, get re-elected. Given these leaps in progress, we can, of course, make race-neutral policies that can bring forth diversity. We can improve public schools in general so that educational opportunity is more equally distributed. We can identify and support talented kids, of any race, and put them in advanced academic programmes. We can demand that these private schools increase the number of kids they admit in the first place, through more scholarships and income assistance schemes. These things will do a better job than affirmative action, and be more politically defensible.
Many might say that I'm foolish in my advocacy for colourblindness and my attack against affirmative action. Many will say that as a blind black person, I'm advocating for a type of self-sabotage and that I'm aligning myself with the people who, as Randel Kennedy described, "just don't want black people to get ahead." Many people will also say that due to the continued existence of racism to not have affirmative action is at best naïve, and at worst, malicious. To quote the dissent of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, "deeming race irrelevant in law doesn't make it so in life." I would respond with if we're going to make a better world for everyone, we cannot make someone's race be a disadvantage. We cannot endorse a policy that compels Asians to conceal their heritage to maximise their odds of getting into an elite college. We cannot endorse a policy that makes Asians have to score higher on a standardised test to get the same chance of being admitted as a black or Hispanic person with a lower score. This view doesn't make me an anomaly, it puts me in step with the majority of Americans. I know that I've faced prejudice in my life, but the remedy to this is not to take my race and disability into account when I'm applying to college.
Justice Sotomayor in her dissent said that "the devastating impact of the decision cannot be overstated." I disagree. Racism is not as fearsome as it was during the 1960s, and we must develop policies that reflect that. Contrary to what Kendi thinks, the remedy for past discrimination is not present discrimination, and deeming race irrelevant in law is the first step to making race irrelevant in life. That is how we got as far as we have on racial progress. I know racism is still a problem, and there's still work to be done, but we can achieve our goals through the means of colourblindness. "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," said Justice Roberts in the majority opinion. If we are going to make this multiethnic experiment work, we cannot let the social construct of race act as a variable that has any impact on who gets what and why. The goal of anti-racism should be to decrease the importance of race in one's life, and thankfully, the Supreme Court has made a contribution to this effort.