(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . SCOTUS scuttles Affirmative Action as Roberts declares "Enough, already"... [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-07-01 equal protection The takeaway for many after the latest Supreme Court ruling that scuttled Affirmative Action in college admissions is that this was just another liberal totem to fall before the now hopelessly conservative court. However, the ruling is much more than that for those on the right. If the twentieth-century was about an expansion of individual rights and an honest attempt to right the wrongs of centuries past, the twenty-first is about the fallout of what may have been an overabundance of hope. On the surface, the ruling seems to be arguing that, as Justice Roberts has written, Affirmative Action violates the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. — Fourteenth Amendment, Section one Passed in the wake of the Civil War (1868) the 14th Amendment was really a reiteration of the due process rights initially recognized in the 5th Amendment that promised equal protections of citizens from Federal laws and the consequences of laws passed by the majority that could negatively affect minority citizens. The 14th Amendment extended those protections to the states and laws that would negatively impact minority populations, for example, former slaves. Here is how Justice Roberts in his opinion dismissed the relevance of the 14th Amendment as a basis for Affirmative Action: The Harvard and U.N.C. admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today. — Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Roberts spits the bit With all due (process) respect, the Chief Justice has missed the substantive meaning of the constitutional bases on which his opinion rests. He forgets to consider the consequences of centuries without those protections and the notorious Reconstruction era’s Jim Crow laws which ignored the specific protections the amendment sought to ensure. After all, Roberts is old enough to remember, and his Harvard education most assuredly must have glossed, the fact that it was a consequence of the lack of equal protection under the law that made it necessary for James Meredith, the first black student to attend the racially segregated University of Mississippi, to require the protection of armed Federal marshals to enroll— in 1962! Roberts’ opinion neglects to consider that while Brown vs. Board was decided in 1954, in states throughout the nation it wasn’t enforced for over a decade. The Warren Court’s decision was not intended, nor did it accomplish, an end to the racist sentiments that denied access of blacks and other minorities to educational equality. It simply recognized and provided a landmark totem that all “persons born or naturalized in the United States” had the right to equal access to education. In the 1978 Bakke decision, the Court took it one step further. While it agreed that schools could not set strict quotas in their admissions process, it could make race a factor in distinguishing between applicants. In this case, a white applicant, Allan Bakke, petitioned the court to strike down the quota system established by the University of California at Davis reserving a portion of the available seats in the program for minority students. In the 5-4 decision the Court agreed with Bakke, but the majority opinion written by Justice Powell asserted the right of schools to use race because, beyond the student and the school, the state had an interest in maintaining diversity It is often overlooked in Bakke that the decision ordered the white student to be placed in the class and Bakke graduated from Davis and practiced his profession at the Mayo Clinic. The decision was split but from the disaggregated opinions the concept of affirmative action was created. The majority concluded that while strict quotas violated the very equal protections the Davis Medical School used as the basis of its policy, there did exist an interest in protecting disadvantaged and formerly oppressed minorities from rights and privileges the majority took for granted. This is the essence of affirmative action and a reasonable “factor” to be considered when a school is determining the composition of its incoming class. whitewashing prejudice In fact, as it has been noted throughout this argument, race as a factor is as legitimate, or more so, than the privilege regarded to athletes or “legacy” applicants. And in considering Justice Powell’s reflection on the historical impact of racism and how it is evidenced in the demographics of poverty in America and its effect on educational attainment based as much on geography as it is on a student’s grades and scores. Circumstance places many of the poorest citizens in urban and rural schools which are generally underfunded due to taxing capacity and income as compared to suburban schools. The consequences of our nation's past, and to an extent our private and institutional prejudice, blow away Chief Justice Roberts’ rather oblivious conclusions about real-time racial sensibility: While the poverty rate for the population as a whole is 11.6% the rate varies greatly by race. Blacks have the highest poverty rate at 19.5% and Non-Hispanic whites have the lowest at 8.1%. The Poverty rate for Blacks and Hispanics is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites. — Federal Safety Net, U.S; Poverty Statistics, September 13, 2022 The recent attempts by the conservative Roberts Court to strip away the progress of the past century is evident in Dobbs and now Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard should be viewed collectively as the right’s attack on not simply the matters at hand, but at the core of our nation’s two hundred year battle for its soul. The Court is waging battle with modernity. Affirmative Action is simply one more inconvenience the privileged and indulged justices refuse to accept in the name of equality. In rulings handed down today, and grist for another day’s diary, they snubbed the LGBTQ+ community and students who are steeped in educational debt. Who knows what’s next? I agree with Michelle Alexander, New York Times columnist and author of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in her observation of the ruling majority’s self-satisfaction and belief in the progress made by minorities over the course of our more recent history: The sprinkling of people of color through elite institutions in the United States, due to affirmative action policies and the limited progress of middle-class and upper-middle-class African Americans, creates the illusion of great progress. — Michelle Alexander Access and opportunity as defined by the intent of the equal protections clause do not end with the right of the enslaved to be freed. All “immunities and privileges “ of citizenship are owed to each of us— and none should be overlooked because some feel we have done enough. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/1/2178430/-SCOTUS-scuttles-Affirmative-Action-as-Roberts-declares-enough-already Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/