Home
Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
The Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling is 60 years too late
The Supreme Court Affirmative Action Ruling is 60 years too late
Paul Craig Roberts
After nearly six decades of racial discrimination against white American males in university admissions, the Supreme Court belatedly struck down the admission of blacks to universities on the basis of race.
The American public, still majority white but declining, supports the Supreme Court’s defense of the 14th Amendment that requires equal treatment. The law schools, universities, media, and Democrats do not.
The Equal Treatment doctrine is based on a merit-based society. If a black person, or anyone, can meet the objective admission requirements for university admissions, the person cannot be denied on the basis of his race. As evidence has shown, Harvard University is a massive discriminator agains Asians in order to make room for objectively less qualified blacks. Asians brought the law suit that the Supreme Court decided in their favor.
The question is: Does the Supreme Court’s decision mean anything? The answer is no.
The Court waited too long. The decades of privileges for blacks easily meet the “squatters’ rights” rule. In these decades racial rights for blacks in university admissions, hiring, and promotion have been institutionalized. The US Supreme Court’s ruling has no way of enforcing itself, because university admissions are no longer based on objective standards.
As Heather Mac Donald has made clear, university admissions now rely on subjective measures. A black applicant’s essay on the experience and consequences of being black in America, if the right words are used, outweighs the objective measures applied to white applicants.
America has undergone an ideological change from merit to equity. The fact is that Woke universities and corporations want more blacks and will get them regardless of the Supreme Court. As the intellectual quality of university faculties continues to collapse as emotion replaces reason and official narratives replace facts, high achieving thoughtful students are regarded as a problem.
In the current issue of the City Journal, John O. McGinnis explains that law schools are abandoning law and the Constitution because they are a hindrance to preferential treatment for blacks. The law school, medical school, military, and university emphasis on substituting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” for a merit-based society of equal opportunity requires the playing field to be unleveled because merit leads to unequal outcomes. The “color blindness” of the original “affirmative action” is out, because it is merit based. Today black admissions are based on subjective factors that favor blacks.
As objective admission standards are abandoned, the evidence of unequal treatment provided by blacks being admitted with lower objective scores vanishes. An essay on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” takes the place of objective measures. US law schools are turning out graduates who regard the Supreme Court’s defense of the Constitution as prohibiting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” values that have replaced equal treatment under the law.
In other words, the dominant ideology among America’s intellectual class no more supports the founding document of our country than does the New York Times’ “1619 Project.” As the calls for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justices show, the Court is no longer regarded as legitimate by the intellectual class and talking heads on TV.
The cultural Marxists have succeeded in their revolution. Our country has been overthrown.