Affirmative action as we know it is officially over.
The US supreme court ruled this week that race can no longer be considered as a factor in university admissions. And just to be clear, affirmative action as a whole isn’t cancelled – it’s just the race part that the court is gutting.
Affirmative action has always been divisive. But two recent cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) are what finally killed it.
The court ruled against both universities, siding with an organisation called Students for Fair Admissions, who argued that race-conscious admissions at American universities constituted a violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – the part that bars discrimination based on race, colour or national origin.
It’s pretty obvious why the racial portion of affirmative action is important. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that school segregation was finally outlawed (on paper at least). But contrary to popular perception, affirmative action isn’t just a “get in free” card for Black post-secondary students. Women, people with disabilities and other historically marginalized groups have all benefited from the court’s recognition that circumstances beyond their control may exclude them from these institutions.
But much like welfare, public housing and other social programs created to help all vulnerable people, Black students were made the poster children for affirmative action.
Perhaps the most sinister end result of this racial stereotyping is the way it successfully pits Black and Asian communities against each other. The racist discourse around affirmative action teaches Asian students that they’re being disadvantaged in college admissions in favor of Black students. As such, the myth of the model minority – who plays by the rules and has pulled themselves up by the bootstraps – has made many Asian Americans complicit in white supremacy’s strategy of anti-Blackness masked as fairness.
“Today is a great day for Asian Americans and all Americans,” Yukong Zhao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, told the BBC about the court’s decision. “This decision will preserve meritocracy, which is the bedrock of the American dream.”
Zhao is grasping here for something that simply doesn’t exist. American meritocracy is a myth that was crafted by the powerful to excuse their role in inequity. Work hard, and you can have anything you want. But what they really mean to say is: ignore all the socio-political realities that make life harder for some people, so we don’t have to talk about what makes it easier for others. Or how the two are inextricably linked.
And if all this was really about people earning their place, why is race the only factor being scapegoated? Because here’s the thing: legacy admissions, donor admissions, athlete scholarships and other forms of admissions preferences are affirmative action. And some of the most effective kinds. I wrote in this very column about a 2021 study that found nearly half of all white students at Harvard were either athletes, had alumni parents, had donor parents or were children of Harvard employees. Only 57% of Harvard’s white students had gotten in on merit. Yet somehow the court decides two years later that that same school doesn’t need to be intentional about diversity? Come on.
But of course, this wouldn’t be an American story if the people who worked to throttle affirmative action weren’t also the ones benefiting from it the most. And no one has seen more gains from anti-discrimination legislation (both in and outside college admissions) than white women. White women have made much further social progress than any other minoritized group since the words affirmative action were first placed within the law in 1935, yet they remain some of its strongest opponents.
Even Justice Clarence Thomas, who has long been opposed to affirmative action and wrote that it was “patently unconstitutional” is a beneficiary himself. He was happy to be accepted into and attend Yale when the school joined the affirmative action movement in the 70s, and was seeking out Black students to make up about 10% of its incoming class. Talk about hypocrisy.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tackled the glaring stupidity of the ending race-based affirmative action, especially given the state of race relations in the country today.
“Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better,” she wrote.
And if the future state of higher education wasn’t depressing enough, we can’t forget the big picture. The decision about affirmative action comes amid a gradual rolling back of several laws that protect society’s most vulnerable people, including abortion rights, gun safety laws, voting rights and even no-fault divorces.
These efforts to diminish women’s autonomy and smother the rights of racialized people aren’t an anomaly – they’re a bitter taste of what is to come.
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
