The U.S.
Supreme Court heard oral arguments on
Monday to decide whether to throw college
affirmative action programs
in the dustbin of history, and the highest
court in the land appears poised to scrap the policy. We have
the most diverse Supreme Court we have
ever seen, yet it features an
ultra-conservative majority that seems
well-suited to upholding white male
supremacy. This court, which harkens back
to the days of Dred Scott v. Sandford — which
said Black people “had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect” — and Plessy
v. Ferguson, which
upheld the “separate
but
unequal”
conditions of Jim Crow segregation — is
eroding our rights every day and may soon
end affirmative action.
And if
they do, you can thank Edward Blum. Blum,
head of the group Students for Fair
Admissions, is behind the anti-affirmative
action lawsuit before the court, which
will look at the affirmative action
admissions policies at Harvard and the
University of North Carolina. Lower courts
have found the schools have legally used
race as one factor among others in
maintaining a diverse student body.
But Blum,
like the broader right-wing project, has
been chomping at the bit to eliminate
these programs. After all, he has brought
over
two
dozen cases in
federal court to challenge the use of race
in higher education and voting rights.
This is a man who has devoted his life to
fighting and destroying racially conscious
laws meant to even the playing field. This
is about people who want to ensure that
even bare-minimum programs for racial
justice, diversity, equity and inclusion
are cast aside so that this is once again
a country solely for, of and about white
men. Like the good ol’ days when we knew
our place.
And Black people and other people
of color, the most marginalized and
disenfranchised, are just out of luck and
supposedly just have to deal with it.
The University of North
Carolina, a state
institution that admitted its first Black
student 70 years ago, still faces
challenges enrolling Black men, Native
Americans and Latinx students. Its
affirmative action program is crucial,
given the long history of systemic racism
and white supremacist exclusion UNC has
practiced for most of its history. North
Carolina Solicitor General Ryan Park
argued that “diversity is central to the
education it aims to provide the next
generation of leaders in business,
science, medicine, government and beyond.”
Blum
believes UNC’s affirmative action program
is racially discriminatory, violating
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the
14th Amendment’s equal protection
guarantee. And he also argues Harvard’s
affirmative action program amounts to an illegal
quota
system that
denies opportunity to high-achieving
Asian-American students. Notice how he and
other conservatives not only seek to edge
out Black and brown students who are
already underrepresented and disadvantaged
in colleges but also hope to drive a wedge
among groups of color and undermine racial
solidarity by designating some groups as
unworthy and unqualified — Black and
Latinx — and others — the
Asian-American/Pacific Islander community
— as hardworking “model minorities.” All
of these groups do and should work
together to combat racial, economic and
social injustice, but you see how white
supremacists who care nothing about the
needs of Asian-American students will
attempt to divide and conquer.
Like other right-wing warriors
against racial justice such as Justice
Clarence Thomas, Blum believes race should
not be involved in it and we should just be
colorblind. Of course, those conservatives
who misinterpret and attempt to corrupt the
quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — and
say we should judge people not by the color
of their skin but by the content of their
character, the way Dr. King would want it —
tend to advocate for policies that uphold
white privilege and exclude melanated people
from basic rights, the things you’re allowed
to do when you’re a citizen and a full human
being.
Blum, who
is Jewish and whose family experienced
antisemitism in this country, should know
better. And yet, he is a one-man crusade
against affirmative action who has played
the long game, with
eight lawsuits in the Supreme Court to
undermine Black people since 1996. Blum
founded his Project on Fair Representation
in 2005 and represented Abigail Fisher, a
(mediocre) white applicant who claimed the
University of Texas at Austin rejected her
admission and discriminated against her
because of her whiteness. In 2016, the
high court sided with the University of
Texas.
Over the
years, the court has left affirmative
action in place, but Blum may have found a
friendlier court to do
his bidding. A victory for Blum could
spell doom not only for affirmative action
in higher education but for race-conscious
policies
in employment as well.
“The relief Blum seeks is narrowly
focused on what has always been his
objective: a prohibition on any awareness of
race in college admissions,” wrote Sarah
Hinger, senior staff attorney for the ACLU
Racial Justice Program. Hinger believes Blum
is cynically using the Asian-American
community to eliminate diversity on college
campuses. “If Blum gets his wish,
statistical projections show that white
applicants will be the primary
beneficiaries. Not talking about race
doesn’t erase discrimination; it reinforces
the privileges of white applicants by
ignoring the ways in which deep-seated
structural racial inequality impacts
individuals.”
Notice
that Blum is also opposed to voting
rights, which is no accident. As the ACLU
noted, Blum challenged redistricting in
places such as Texas that would favor
Black and Latinx voters, and he was the
person behind Shelby County v. Holder, which
gutted the Voting Rights Act. And now,
with weakened voting rights enforcement, white
vigilantes of the
Jan. 6 variety feel emboldened to use
their guns to scare Black people from
voting and use elected office to erase
Black voters from the map and from the
rolls.
After all, Jim Crow segregation is
an all-or-nothing proposition. The goal is
to keep Black people and other people of
color disempowered — out of education, out
of the market and out of power. Hoping to
relegate us to the sidelines and out of the
game, so they believe we will be neutered
and rendered unable to fight for ourselves.
And if Blum gets his wishes, the
Supreme Court will eliminate affirmative
action in college admissions. But they won’t
end it there because they are only getting
started.
This
commentary is also posted on The Grio