The Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative
action at Harvard and the University of North
Carolina was both shocking and completely
expected. As a Harvard graduate and college
professor, I have some thoughts to share.
First of all, it should be clear that the U.S. Supreme
Court is an illegitimate, corrupt and morally
bankrupt body. Its conservative members are
unelected MAGA politicians who enjoy gifts from
White supremacist billionaire benefactors, and
we should consider employing civil disobedience
and nonviolent resistance to these unjust
decisions, or simply ignore what these appointed
partisan legislators in robes have to say.
The White nationalist majority on the high court is
gaslighting us, as they proclaim racism is over,
the nation is colorblind, and there is nothing
to see here. And it is quite rich for a white
nationalist majority of jurists to announce
color blindness in a white supremacist society.
Chief Justice John Roberts, a moderate and genteel White
nationalist with manners and a smile, similarly
announced the end of racism when he gutted the
Voting Rights Act a decade earlier in Shelby
County v. Holder.
It is no accident that Edward
Blum, the man who led the litigation effort to destroy voting
rights, was also behind the effort to end
affirmative action. Both projects are
interrelated. Mr. Blum, we see what you did
there. White supremacy views Black progress as a
zero-sum game. Anything that Black people,
people of color and marginalized groups achieve
are at the expense of White people. This is what
I call Great Replacement Theory jurisprudence,
the notion that the court system must uphold the
power of White people, who are viewed as an
endangered species with a declining birth rate
and an emerging numerical minority. Already, the
majority of American children today are children
of color, which alarms White nationalists.
Either you ease into this new reality and
celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion, or
you rig the game to maintain white supremacy.
Affirmative action never was about providing college
admissions or jobs to unqualified people. And
the United States of America never operated
based on merit. “Whenever the issue of
compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised,
some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro
should be granted equality, they agree; but he
should ask nothing more. On the surface, this
appears reasonable, but it is not realistic,” Martin
Luther King said. “A society that has done something special
against the Negro for hundreds of years must now
do something special for the Negro.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, predominantly White
colleges and universities began admitting
substantial numbers of Black folks for the first
time. Before that time, only a handful had been
admitted, if at all. Qualified Black people
always existed and always excelled. However,
many doors were closed. But things changed
during the Civil Rights movement, when Black
leaders were assassinated and the urban
uprisings against racism, police violence and
poverty threatened to burn the whole thing down
- not unlike the George Floyd protests of 2020
and current events in France today.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a hypocrite who
relied on White patronage to become a very
useful tool in the dismantlement of civil
rights, was a beneficiary of affirmative action.
However, Uncle Clarence took the wrong lessons
from that experience, and now all of us must
deal with the consequences of one Black man’s
self-hatred, low self-esteem and concerns over
how White people perceive him.
I benefited from affirmative action, and I don’t care
about how people perceive my qualifications and
merit. As a Black man, I had to work twice as
hard to get half as much, and White society
always assumes black is inferior and
non-deserving. Like Thomas, the late Justice
Antonin Scalia - an evil man who died doing what
he loved, being in the presence of his wealthy
donors - was a proponent of mismatch
theory, a notion that these elite universities are admitting all
these unqualified and unprepared Black and
Latinx students, and it’s simply too much for
them to handle. The elephant in the room is the
discourse around affirmative action, guided by
the unspoken belief in Black
intellectual inferiority.
Since I was a child, from my journey to Harvard, the
University of Pennsylvania Law School and Oxford
- and as a grown man who has seen and done many
things and is now a college professor at Rutgers
and a journalist - people have told me to my
face I was unqualified, incompetent and
mediocre, that I lacked analytical skills,
leadership skills and didn’t have what it takes.
The countless personal affronts, assaults,
attacks and harassment were daily reminders from
White people I did not belong in these spaces.
And yet, I am not special, as most Black people
have their own stories to tell. These
experiences either crush you or make you
stronger.
Getting back to the Supreme Court case, there are some
realities that expose the contradictions in the
affirmative action debate. For example, the
opposition to affirmative action by the whip
cracking White nationalist Supreme Court has
nothing to do with merit, but rather White
privilege. No mention was made of legacy
admissions. At Harvard, 43
percent of the White students admitted are recruited athletes, children of faculty
and staff, children of donors and legacy
students whose relatives are Harvard graduates.
Nearly 70 percent of legacy applicants are
white, and three-quarters of white students
admitted under one of these special categories
would have been rejected otherwise.
In addition, some Asian Americans allowed themselves to
become a wedge in people of color solidarity,
and serve the interests of white supremacy by
claiming they were not admitted to Harvard due
to Black and Brown affirmative action students.
As these “model minority” members will soon
learn, white supremacy cares everything about
white students and little-to-nothing about the
Asian American community, and the end of
affirmative action will hurt their children as
well.
Another contradiction is that the Supreme Court excluded
military academies from its ruling, presumably
because diversity is a national security
priority, or perhaps because the army needs as
many Black and Brown bodies as it can find to
kill Black and Brown people abroad.
Finally, the end of affirmative action is part of the whip
cracking White nationalists’ clarion call. This
decision, along with the other rulings by this
corrupt court on abortion, student loans and
LGBTQ+ rights, is part of the destruction of any
hopes for a government guided by civil and human
rights.
In the meantime, they are coming for the Fourteenth
Amendment. We must fight for our rights, support
HBCUs and demand an increased Black and Brown
presence in predominantly White institutions or
PWIs.
This is the White nationalist’s last stand. Whether we
remain a colonial settler state or become a
multiracial democracy is in our hands. The birth
comes after the labor pains.
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