OPINION:
The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in two cases challenging race discrimination in college admissions. The justices are expected to vote this week on whether to end the practice. They should do so, and thereby significantly impact the nation’s increasing division caused by pervasive race consciousness. If they do so, the high court will not be overturning court precedent but instead bringing the court’s national, decadeslong project to its next step.
In 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the high court: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
“Nothing is more powerful,” Victor Hugo wrote, “than an idea whose time has come.”
From its earliest affirmative action cases, the Supreme Court has allowed court-legislated exceptions to the expressly stated imperative of both the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to forbid discrimination on the basis of race. These exceptions allowed universities to discriminate on the basis of race to counter past wrongs and seek a diverse student body, among other objectives. These objectives have been met. America’s 2,000-plus colleges and universities have spent nearly 50 years giving life-changing opportunity to members of every possible racial and ethnic minority, even if they have recently been favoring some over others. There is no need to argue about the past.
Should it end racial preferences, the court may encourage higher education institutions to apply race-neutral socioeconomic factors to give opportunities to the children of the less advantaged and to maintain a diverse student body defined without skin color. From the chartering of Oxford, affirmative opportunity has long been pursued by educational institutions both in admissions and in generous financial support.
Right now, for example, top universities are openly recruiting and favoring “first generation” applicants, i.e., applicants who are the first in their families or in the first generation of their families to go to college, without consideration of race. The opportunity afforded on this farsighted purpose is profoundly American and is the kind of initiative that all of us can get behind.
We should be truthful in admitting that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s children and President Barack Obama’s daughters are no longer rare as well-privileged African American students, and there is no longer a lack of minority students at prep schools like Harvard Westlake, Hotchkiss, Groton, Andover, Regis and Georgetown Prep who are ready to compete. There is now an enormous educational industry dedicated to giving students from underprivileged backgrounds, mostly minority students, the support that they need to compete with the well-guided and privately tutored children of the educated middle class.
The story of how the College of Holy Cross recruited and educated Justice Clarence Thomas and his Black classmates would be impossible to replicate today if viewed on the basis of race diversity objectives. But the ability of our colleges and universities to give opportunity to “first-gen” students who rise through education from places like Pinpoint, Georgia or the Bronx is much the same.
Knowing that colleges may still commit themselves to opportunity should satisfy those who might see the court as abandoning its affirmative action precedents. There should be no doubt, however, of the great need for the court to end race preference, race discrimination and race consciousness in higher education.
Our country is not the same as when it adopted the civil rights laws in the 1960s. Affirmative action and racial preferences were part of the American story of reparation for the moral stain of slavery and these programs arose from the best of our sense of justice and desire of equality in socioeconomic success. Decades later, race has been radically politicized by the political left, and nowhere is this most evident than on America’s college campuses.
As a Hispanic immigrant and a first-gen student, I was diversity-privileged by Georgetown University. My peers who arrived at the Black House at Georgetown in 1978 for a pre-orientation shared purpose, gratitude and grace. Four decades later, “diversity” on campuses is not well captured by the admission glossy magazine. At Georgetown, for example, “Diversity” is a now-required course, like Theology.
Writing about Georgetown’s Philodemic Debate Society and its hostility to White men, Catholics and conservative women, I noted recently that the diversity-privileged arrive on campuses today not only indoctrinated but also indignant, arrogant, entitled and superior. Unlike us in 1978, today the diversity-benefited are ideological and feel entitled — and entitled to meet White students with prejudice and antagonism. Perhaps “racist” is too strong a word. “Diversity bullies” might be a more accurate description. This comes from eight or more years of attending annual diversity training, forced to read Ibram X. Kendi and the other profiteer thought-leaders of America’s new racism.
The Supreme Court should take note that the race preferences that it has protected no longer bear the fruit that they once did. Race consciousness on campuses has made the entire culture toxic. Affirmative action in higher education is now a root cause not only of the politicization of the academy but also the current racialization-of-everything agenda that divides the entire nation.
The time has come to read the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 faithfully and bring an end to state-sponsored race discrimination. To do otherwise would be to countenance and promote the racist excesses that every American knows come from our campuses. It is time for the Supreme Court to require universities to change the toxic culture that they have allowed to fester.
• Manuel A. Miranda served as civil rights counsel to the U.S. Senate majority leader and president of the Cardinal Newman Society for Catholic Higher Education.
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