“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest” of diversity in the student bodies of universities. So wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 2003, 18 years ago, as the Supreme Court upheld the idea that such diversity is a legitimate interest but looked askance at racial preferences as a temporarily necessary evil.
O'Connor probably never anticipated that top schools such as Yale and Harvard would begin to discriminate actively against some racial minorities in the name of so-called social justice. Yet that is exactly what they are doing, supposedly so that they can get more of the “right” minority populations enrolled. Their rationalization of racism doesn’t make their actions any less racist.
Harvard, Yale, and others are using gross racist stereotypes in the service of limiting the number of Asian American applicants they accept. Especially today, with the media showcasing a rash of violence against Asian Americans, this practice must be stopped.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court will now have an opportunity. The justices have been petitioned to take a case that would let them revisit this issue and set down the marker clearly that in 2021, college admissions should be color blind. We hope they do just that.
A group called Students for Fair Admissions has sued Harvard for its deliberate exclusion of students of Asian extraction. The admissions officers, the lawsuit says, exclude Asians by lowballing their subjective scores for personality traits such as “likability,” “courage,” and “kindness.” They practice racism in this manner in hopes of being more generous with racial preferences toward other groups, such as black and Hispanic students.
The Biden administration disgracefully dropped a federal lawsuit against Yale on similar grounds. The Trump administration had recognized the pernicious racism of both Ivy League schools. Lawyers from Donald Trump’s Justice Department not only sued Yale but also drafted an insightful amicus brief for this private lawsuit against Harvard.
"Harvard concedes that eliminating consideration of race would increase Asian-American admissions while decreasing those of Harvard’s favored racial groups," Justice Department lawyers noted. "The resulting racial penalty stems in part from one component of Harvard’s admissions rubric — a nebulous and entirely subjective 'personal rating' — that consistently and inexplicably produces poorer scores for Asian Americans than for other applicants. That disparity is undisputed, and unexplained.”
The extreme racism of this practice should be obvious. It goes beyond just the deliberate discrimination. Even worse is that Harvard and Yale are appealing to unfair and cruel racial stereotypes about Asians.
Discriminatory racial preferences have never been the answer when it comes to fostering student body diversity or even specifically for advancing black and Hispanic student achievement. The answer there is and has always been education reform at the elementary and secondary level, to better prepare black and Hispanic students for college. Unfortunately, Democrats oppose the necessary reforms out of obedience to the teachers unions that write the checks and get out the vote.
So now, they are trying to make up for it by supporting institutionalized racism against Asians.
The abolition of racial preferences in California’s state colleges and universities, thanks to voter passage of Proposition 209 in 1996, has not resulted in plummeting admissions for black and Hispanic students in the long run. Although their numbers dipped for a few years, black students made up the same 4% of the freshman class in the University of California system in 2017 as they had in 1995. The share of Hispanic students in the UC system expanded during the same period from 15% to 26%, reflecting both the growing Latino population and its rising levels of academic achievement.
Two other things have changed in the UC system since Proposition 209. One is that the Asian populations at these schools have grown dramatically, such that the overall number of nonwhite students in the system is about 3 times what it once was. The other is that all students in the UC system now know they have been admitted on merit. None of them can be condescendingly disparaged as charity cases who must be less capable because of their skin color.
In today’s national political context, leftists are seeking to racialize all disagreements and to judge everyone primarily by the color of their skin. This more or less screams out for this case to be taken up by the Supreme Court and adjudicated. We implore the justices to take this case against Harvard and strike a death blow against racism, even where it is practiced under the guise of supposedly good intentions.
