https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-the-supreme-court-finally-get-it-right-on-affirmative-action/
Hard on its landmark victories for judicial and Constitutional integrity last term, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this month on two cases challenging admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. If decided rightly, both cases should lead to the banning of unconstitutional, discriminatory racial preferences in university admissions.
After years of previous cases in which the Supreme Court tried various work-arounds to avoid stopping discrimination, maybe this year the Justices will get it right.
From its beginning in the 1978 decision Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the jurisprudence of subsequent cases have, as Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case put it, “refus[ed] to define rigorously the broad state interest” served by “diversity,” and thus demonstrate specifically the “educational benefits that flow from student body diversity,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy in Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) vaguely defined that “compelling state interest” allegedly justifying discrimination on the basis of race.
As we’ve seen for 44 years, this vacuum created by the lack of clarity about what “diversity” is exactly, and how it specifically enhances educational outcomes, has been filled by illiberal ideology and factional politics that serves partisan purposes rather than educational ones. The “diversity,” then, that courts, businesses, educational institutions, and government trade in is so broad and simplistic that it guarantees the concept will be used to pick political and racial winners and losers.
Let’s start with the idea of “diversity” that supposedly justifies violating the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Actual diversity is light-years more complex than the old “scientific” racist categories of “black,” “white,” “Asian,” and later “Hispanic,” based on skin color, hair texture, or other superficial characteristics. Relying on these physical criteria ignores the real diversity that appears at the level of ethnicity: socio-economic class, language, dialects, customs, mores, folkways, regional differences, faith, and political preferences. Indeed, so bizarre has this crude “diversity” become that a poor white kid from a region historically impoverished who supposedly enjoys “white privilege” doesn’t add as much “diversity” to the student body as an affluent black student does.
Race-based preferences, then, ignore all those more interesting and meaningful markers of diverse identities––except the last one, politics. Particularly in education, “protected” categories like “race” and “gender” take precedence, and traffic in a “diversity” that camouflages a rigid intellectual and ideological orthodoxy. We used to called it “multiculturalism,” but now it sports the Orwellian moniker “woke.” The grand narrative of the “woke” is the melodrama of permanent white racial oppression of selected victims “of color.” “Diversity” now has been joined to “equity” and “inclusion” in order to define an ideology that is homogeneous, unequal, and excluding––the opposite of real diversity.
