The
United States Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking
down race as a factor in college and university
admissions was in response to a case brought by
a conservative organization claiming that Asian
Americans are harmed by preferences for people
of other nonwhite races. The case, which focused
on Harvard University and the University of
North Carolina’s affirmative action policies,
used Asian students as a wedge against Black,
Latino, Indigenous, and other communities of
color. More importantly, it left preferences for
wealthy white students intact.
Justice
Clarence Thomas, writing on behalf of the
majority that voted in favor of ending
affirmative action, said in response to Justice
Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion,
“How, for example, would Justice Jackson explain
the need for race-based preferences to the
Chinese student who has worked hard his whole
life, only to be denied college admission in
part because of his skin color?”
His
concern for Chinese students would be touching
were it not for the fact that, according to the
New York Times, Thomas “was admitted to Yale Law
School under an explicit affirmative action plan
with the goal of having blacks and other
minority members make up about 10 percent of the
entering class.” Further, Thomas said in a 1983 speech,
that affirmative action policies were of
“paramount importance.” He added that “But for
them, God only knows where I would be today…
These laws and their proper application are all
that stand between the first 17 years of my life
and the second 17 years.” He has significantly
changed his tune since then.
Janelle
Wong, a professor of American studies at the
University of Maryland, College Park, told NBC that
the right uses fake concerns about Asian
students to promote their goal of undermining
racial equity policies, saying, “They weaponize
concerns about anti-Asian attacks and violence
against other minorities.” Wong added, “This is
an old tactic in white supremacy’s playbook and
should not be allowed to succeed.”
In
using Asians to undermine the policies that
offer equity-based redress for racially
marginalized groups, Thomas and his conservative
colleagues—the rest of whom are all white—left
intact a crucial method from which wealthy white
people benefit: so-called legacy admissions.
Journalist
Michael Harriot put it this way on Twitter,
“The Court struck down Affirmative Action For
everyone except WHITE PEOPLE.”
By
that, he meant that conservative Supreme Court
justices did not restrict preferences for the
children of alumni, employees, donors, and other
similarly well-connected, privileged people.
Former
president George
W. Bush is
a classic example of how legacy admissions are
effectively a form of affirmative action for
whites. How else would a mediocre student like
him be admitted to Yale University? But because
his father and grandfather were both Yale
alumni, Bush was basically a nepo
baby.
Legacy admissions give people like him a leg-up
in ensuring that generational wealth, privilege,
and power remain in the family.
The
origins of legacy admissions lie in
antisemitism. According to a book by Jerome
Karabel written nearly two decades ago, The
Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and
Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
legacy admissions were a way to reduce the
number of Jewish Americans who were increasingly
academically qualified to win admission but who
did not fit into the white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant tradition that such schools uplifted.
So, elite universities changed the goal posts,
ensuring that family ties gave mediocre, but
well-connected, Protestant whites an edge.
That
preferential treatment continues today,
reinforcing white supremacy. For example,
according to one Ivy League college admissions
consultation firm Admission
Sight, legacy admissions are a way for
universities to deepen “their economic and
community-building contributions.” Such
euphemistic language obscures the fact that the
ugly practice of legacy admissions is in fact a
race-based affirmative action policy—for wealthy
whites—a community that needs no affirmation
given the white supremacist society in which it
flourishes.
Admission
Sight also
admitted that “According to the released Harvard
legacy acceptance rate, more than 36 percent of
the students in the Harvard Class of 2022 are
descendants of previous Harvard students.” Those
who cannot claim their parents attended Harvard,
since 2015, “had a five times lower chance of
being accepted than those who came from a
Harvard family.”
There
is another entry point for wealth and privilege
if legacy admissions don’t apply—bribery. In a
court case stemming from the college
admissions scandal that
broke in 2019, it was revealed that the University
of Southern California was
willing to consider applicants whose families
offered large donations to the school. These
“special interest” or “VIP” donors received
preferential treatment. Even the University of
California, a state university system, has been
found to give preferential
treatment to wealthy whites.
A state audit found that at least 64 people,
most of them wealthy and white, were admitted in
recent years to UC schools solely because of
their family connections and donations.
Whites
have even used affirmative action policies
intended for racial minorities whenever possible
to access higher education, seeking to game the
system by using genetic testing.
A
2006 New
York Times story quoted
the white father of adopted twins gleefully
touting that newly available DNA tests showed
his white-passing sons were “9 percent Native
American and 11 percent northern African.” The
man admitted that the birth parents of the twins
were white, but that “you can bet that any
advantage we can take we will.”
But
when a white woman named Nicole
Katchur was
told that she ought to take a genetic test to
see if nonwhite ancestry could help her win
admission, instead of calling out admissions
officers for encouraging white people to game a
system intended to promote racial equity,
Katchur instead sued to end affirmative action.
Rather than seeing her whiteness as a built-in
advantage, she blamed policies that helped
people of color obtain a level playing field.
That same logic informed the 2016 lawsuit
against affirmative action brought by another
white woman, Abigail
Fisher,
in Texas. Indeed white women, who have been the
biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action
policies in college admissions, have also led
the charge to dismantle
those policies.
The
Supreme Court’s latest ruling on affirmative
action doesn’t end race-based preference. It
further entrenches white supremacist
preferences.
The
good news is that while one of the Supreme
Court’s conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch,
disagreed with his liberal colleague, Justice
Sonia Sotomayor, on ending race-based admissions
for nonwhite students, he agreed with
her that legacy admissions had to end as well.
The
ruling has also spurred President Joe Biden to
go on the offensive. In a speech responding to
the ruling, he
said,
“Today, I’m directing the Department of
Education to analyze what practices help build…
more inclusive and diverse student bodies and
what practices hold that back, practices like
legacy admissions and other systems that expand
privilege instead of opportunity.”
Democratic
Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon told MarketWatch,
“The longstanding use of legacy and donor
preferences in admissions has unfairly elevated
children of donors and alumni—who may be
excellent students and well-qualified, but are
the last people who need an extra leg up in the
complicated and competitive college admissions
process.” He explained that a policy like legacy
admissions, “creates an unlevel playing field
for students without those built-in advantages,
especially minority and first-generation
students.”
To
that end, Merkley and Democratic Representative
Jamaal Bowman of New York recently introduced
the Fair
College Admissions for Students Act,
which would end preferential treatment for
applications from wealthy, privileged families.
Whether
or not the bill moves in
Congress,
the fact remains that college
admissions
are biased—toward wealthy
white
Americans.
Those conservatives celebrating
the end
of
affirmative action have exposed yet
again
how their real agenda is to ensure
that
white wealth continues to benefit
This
commentary was
produced
by Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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