SCOTUS Strikes Down Affirmative Action In College Admissions

5 thoughts on “SCOTUS Strikes Down Affirmative Action In College Admissions”

1. It's nice to be ignorant, arrogant, privileged, and life-tenured.  Doesn't mean you're not completely removed from real life, robed clowns. 

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2. History, Logic and the Court. Josh Marshall at TPM.

   Best, Concise Take on the Supreme Court. My apologies for quoting the comment in full.

   Let me share a few brief and general thoughts on today’s decision.

   First, on its internal logic the decision can appear compelling. But step back and you see that a specific class of Americans who were enslaved for two centuries and then mostly lived under a system of legal apartheid for another century somehow still remain largely excluded from social and economic preferment. And we’re told that the constitution not only bars the government from doing anything about that but also bars private institutions from attempting to do anything about that. Judged from that more holistic perspective it’s very hard to see how that can possibly be right whatever the internal logic of ‘color blindness’.

   Second, the same people who wrote the amendments that undergird this decision also passed various laws specifically to raise Black social and economic power to the level of white people. So the Court’s definition of ‘color blindness’ simply cannot have been the intent of the authors of the amendment. The history is open and shut.

   Third, the question of whether the constitution requires or looks favorably on racial diversity is a complex question and it’s not entirely clear that it does, at least if we’re limited our analysis tightly to the intent of the people who wrote the relevant amendments. But if originalism or history plays any role in your jurisprudence African-Americans represent a unique class which the constitution specifically intends to raise to the level of white people. One could argue that that task is done somehow, or that society has changed in some respect that makes the original injunction operate differently or that affirmative and compensatory educational preferment is somehow uniquely damaging and thus a disallowed means of achieving that aim. But again, specifically for African-Americans, the ‘color blindness’ constitutional argument doesn’t add up.

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3. Michelle Obama on today’s decision:

   I wanted to share some of my thoughts on today's Supreme Court decision on affirmative action: pic.twitter.com/Wa6TGafzHV

   — Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 29, 2023

    

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4. Excellent Follow-up Coverage on SCOTUS pretensions of a color-blind society – HCR, and TPM.

   Heather Cox-Richardson adds some historical comments to the Supreme Court decision. I won't link because I'm sure that ya'll are on her mailing list already.

   TPM has some scathing comments, and links to other good commentary. Apologies again for copying so much:

   History Is Not For Amateurs

   The Supreme Court was caught trying to do historying again without proper supervision.

   The result is an ahistorical mess of a decision on affirmative action in college admissions that reduces the 14th Amendment to a garden party nicety – instead of the hard-won product of a then-new kind of brutal modern warfare and still the deadliest military conflict in American history.

   But it wasn’t just the origins of the 14th Amendment that Chief Justice John Roberts got wrong …

   When Will It Effing End?

   Most notably in Shelby County v. Holder and now in his majority opinion on affirmative action, Chief Justice John Roberts seems almost obsessed with the question of when we can finally bring an end to all of these extraordinarily generous legal accommodations for Black folk.

   When? WHEN!

   After 300 years of slavery, forced servitude, white supremacy, brutal repression, and systemic oppression, Roberts has a calendar out counting the years – not decades, not centuries – until we can call it a wrap on trying to clean up this historical mess.

   Without a whit of self awareness that he is an inheritor of the lineage of conservative white Americans who brought you slave plantations, Reconstruction, “separate but equal,” Jim Crow, the KKK, and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, Roberts rushes to ask: “Are we done yet?”

   In yesterday’s decision, he declared that there’s “no end in sight” to affirmative action in college admissions and with that sweeping pronouncement brought the whole thing to an abrupt end.

   I mean, really, haven’t we white Americans done enough? We’re what – four or five decades into this now? That seems like a long time. Aren’t we finished?

   It’s an unbelievable level of hubris, self regard, and magical thinking.

   When I Knew …

   I got to the first footnote in Roberts’ majority opinion, and slumped in my chair.

   It calls out Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson directly, by name, in way that I cannot imagine calling out a Black woman in public, let alone in an affirmative action case in which I’m writing for a majority of five white justices plus Clarence Thomas. It quibbles with the math and the logic of her dissent, while not engaging with the emotional and intellectual thrust of it.

   Don’t misunderstand. Jackson can more than hold her own. She doesn’t need to be treated with kid gloves. And this wasn’t in general more pointed than a lot of the back and forth the justices engage in, but in this context and at this moment, well, I just knew this was going to get worse before it got better.

   …

   Select SCOTUS Quotes

   • “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” – Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson
   • “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.” –Justice Sonia Sotomayor
   • “Lost arguments are not grounds to overrule a case. When proponents of those arguments, greater now in number on the Court, return to fight old battles anew, it betrays an unrestrained disregard for precedent.” –Justice Sonia Sotomayor

   So Much To React To

   So many eloquent and thoughtful writers on racism, the Civil War amendments, affirmative action, and legal history who do more justice to yesterday’s decision than I can:

   • Sherrilyn Ifill: The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Are Breaking History and Our Future
   • Kevin Kruse: Colorblind Conservatism
   • Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern: Ketanji Brown Jackson Wrung One Thing Out of John Roberts’ Affirmative Action Opinion
   • Joyce Vance: History Rhymes Again

    

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5. What more evidence do you need?

   Mike Pence Says His Kids Are Somehow Proof Affirmative Action Is No Longer Needed (msn.com)

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