Affirmative action was always supposed to be a temporary fix, rendering itself obsolete when it finished doing its job bringing diversity and equity to U.S. schools and workplaces. It clearly hasn’t done either—but with a Supreme Court decision expected this month, its obsolescence may come early.
“Of course, anything could happen,” says Debo P. Adegbile, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who currently chairs the anti-discrimination practice at the law firm WilmerHale. Affirmative action as we’ve come to know it—the practice of intentionally considering candidates from underrepresented or marginalized groups in various educational and work contexts—has withstood 45 years of legal challenges, and the Supreme Court has upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past, he points out.
