Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on August 5, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.
For nearly five decades, American universities systematically discriminated against white and Asian Americans. Quotas, “holistic review processes,” and “factors” were used to advance the left’s racist social policies, first on the pretense that they remedied prior discrimination, next in alignment with the theory that diversity was good for the nation, and most recently to deal with the pretend phenomena known as “systemic racism” and “white privilege.”
Such racist, utopian scheming used to be called “affirmative action,” an innocuous term designed to conceal blatantly racist and unlawful discrimination. But despite the anodyne packaging, discrimination against whites and Asians violates the plain meaning of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and amendments thereto—and the Fourteenth Amendment. It always has. Today, more Americans, including more white and Asian American students, are fighting back against the left’s racist university admissions policies, scholarship eligibility criteria, and related practices.
These changes are happening around the nation, including in North Carolina’s leading institutions, with Duke walking back a race-based scholarship program on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous ruling against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions.
Liars and Lawyers
The Constitution and the nation’s paramount civil rights laws prohibit the type of racism that, for 50 years, the left has advanced. Indeed, only a lawyer with a particular ideological bent could ignore the plain meaning of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (No state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”) or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“No person … shall, on the ground of race … be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance”).
Fortunately for the Left, most Supreme Court justices since 1978 have been ideological fellow travelers. As such, the unlawfulness of the left’s racist university admissions policies was never more than an inconvenience. Beginning with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and continuing with Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and numerous other cases, High Court majorities overlooked racism against whites and Asians by refusing to confront the plain meaning of the law.
Initially, the left discovered that it could sell racism to a national audience by cloaking it as benevolent. Here’s Justice Brennan in Bakke: “Government may [use racial discrimination] when it acts … to remedy … past racial prejudice.” In other words, the left’s racism was socially acceptable—and therefore lawful—because it was intended to compensate blacks for past discrimination. This non sequitur carried the day for 25 years before it gave way to pollyannaish claims about diversity’s supposed benefits.
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