The New York Times reports a stunning development at the Department of Justice – it will start enforcing laws against racial discrimination when whites and Asians are the victims. Such a policy change would reverse decades long practices of turning a blind eye to, and even supporting race based discrimination meant to elevate blacks and Hispanics, and punish whites and Asians. The Times wrote:
The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
The document, an internal announcement to the civil rights division, seeks current lawyers interested in working for a new project on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
Allen Bakke was denied admission to medical school at U.C. Davis because he was white. It seemed like a simple case since the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly prohibits being “denied admission to or not permitted to continue in attendance at a public college by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin.” The Supreme Court of California agreed. In a 6-1 ruling, Justice Mosk wrote:
We conclude that the program, as administered by the University, violates the constitutional rights of nonminority applicants because it affords preference on the basis of race to persons who, by the University’s own standards, are not as qualified for the study of medicine as nonminority applicants denied admission.
Well, the Golden State university governors couldn’t have people being judged based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, a dog’s dinner (or hodge podge) issued forth – six separate opinions were written, with no consensus on the issues presented. Two key takeaways were that it was acceptable to discriminate against whites at least, but not to have hard quotas for minority placement. Thus, University of California v. Bakke in 1978 began the long burlesque we now have, where colleges and universities pretend they don’t discriminate wildly against Asians and whites, and those charged with enforcing the law pretend they aren’t breaking it.
The legacy of allowing such discrimination has yielded a society where blacks and Hispanics are entitled to massive preferences in higher education, while whites and especially Asians bear the legacy of anti-racists’ good intentions – in the back of the bus. A popular mantra for minority populations in the United States is that they need to work exceptionally hard to succeed. President Obama, delivering historically black Morehouse College’s commencement address said:
Every one of you has a grandma or an uncle or a parent whose told you at some point in life as an African American you have to work twice as hard as anyone else if you want to get by.
Well, not to get into medical school. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges’ breakdown of applicants’ race, scores and acceptance, Asians must work between five to ten times harder than blacks to be accepted. Whites only, meanwhile, need to work three to five times as hard. These shocking numbers betray the lie that race is somehow only a “plus-factor” in deciding admission.
In one major Supreme Court case on affirmative action since Bakke, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, upholding the practice, “[w]e expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
That was fourteen years ago. While the courts may wait for another eleven, the moves by this administration to advance a color-blind society are perhaps a long-awaited fulfillment of the color-blind society dreamed – and spoken so eloquently of — by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
