Screw the SCOTUS. Higher Education Needs Racial quotas. (Updated)
I can’t help but think about the Supreme Court decision last term to end affirmative actions in Students for Fair Admissions V. Harvard/University of North Carolina. In the same way I knew that after Roe v. Wade, reproductive freedom would require something better to be created, Black liberation also requires affirmative actions to repair the damage done to Blacks by this country over the years. This means a set-aside for Black people. I can hear the shrieking. “It’s not fair!”
“Why should I, John Q. Whiteperson, be penalized for something I didn’t do!”
“I don’t discriminate against Black people!”
“Some of my best friends are Black!”
I don’t care.
If you’re white, your whiteness is the baseline. You have an advantage, regardless of what other identities you may claim. Probably. But I’m not bothered by that. We need racial quotas.
What’s more, the two presidents who instituted affirmative action as a policy in this country–Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy–contemplated racial quotas. At least that’s how I read their executive orders.
We barely gave affirmative action a chance
In 1961, Kennedy issued an executive order that included a provision requiring government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Later, in 1965, Johnson issued an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination based on those same characteristics for organizations receiving federal contracts and subcontracts. He later added sex to the list of attributes.
Johnson went further: Federal contractors with more than 50 employees and $50,000 in federal contracts would have to establish written affirmative action plans and placement goals for women and racial minorities. Compliance would require an official with the organization to be responsible for implementing the organization’s affirmative action program and establishing methods to accomplish the organization’s set placement goals for women and racial minorities.
By 1978, however, racial quotas had become disfavored because they weren’t fair to white people. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court decided that racial quotes were unconstitutional because they violated the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Equal Protection Clause. The same thing happened in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, as in nearly all cases challenging affirmative actions in higher education (Grutter v. Bollinger), where a white student claimed that a Black had taken their spot when in fact, it was their own mediocrity. And even in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, a case ostensibly about the way Harvard University and University of North Carolina’s admissions policies harmed Asian American students, concern about unfairness to white students was the focal point both in oral arguments and in the decision itself.
Fourteen years. It was a step too far to set aside seats for Black students who were traditionally excluded from education. We had to build our own schools to accommodate them. After more than two centuries of slavery. We might have seen results like Brazil’s.
Racial quotas worked in Brazil
In 2012, Brazil–a country that imported more than ten times the number of enslaved Africans as the United States and has more citizens of African heritage than any other country outside Africa –passed a law establishing a national affirmative action program. We might have seen results like Brazil’s.
Racial quotas worked in Brazil
In 2012, Brazil–a country that imported more than ten times the number of enslaved Africans than the United States and has more citizens of African heritage than any country outside of Africa–passed a law establishing a national affirmative action program.
Brazil’s “Law of Social Quotas” mandates that about half of applicants accepted into each program at federal universities must have attended public high schools, come from low-income families, or be members of racial minorities. Half of the spots in each program are reserved for Black, Mixed-Race, and Indigenous Brazilians. The other half is given to low-income students attending public schools. The purpose of the law was to address the racial and economic inequality that has plagued Brazil since the abolition of slavery.
Sound familiar?
In 2022, three researchers–Neil Lewis Jr. of Cornell University, Inacio Bo of the University of Macau, and Rodrigo Zeidan of New York University’s Shanghai campus–wrote a paper about the effects of affirmative action in Brazil. In an article published in the Conversation, they summarized their findings and discredited the arguments used by opponents of affirmative actions to criticize this law. They claimed that affirmative measures were ineffective and led to a lower standard of education for all students. The researchers found that students admitted to universities through affirmative action did not hinder their peers or lower the quality of education. Students who were admitted via affirmative actions ended up pursuing higher education degrees than they otherwise would have, and were “7 percent more likely to work as managers or directors later in their careers.” And students who were admitted via affirmative action ended up pursuing higher education degrees than they otherwise would have, and were “7 percent more likely to work as managers or directors later in their careers.”
Overall, in a decade, the enrollment of Black Brazilians at federal universities shot up by 400 percent.
In addition, the researchers found that race-neutral policies were ineffective for achieving racial diversity.
Diversity isn’t for Black people
I don’t particularly care about racial diversity in this country as a paramount goal. Racial diversity would inevitably result if the United States implemented a racial quota policy like Brazil’s.
I’ve long thought that the diversity rationale for university admissions was a cop-out anyway. It is a way to put a veneer of color-blindness on a policy that should not only be color-conscious, but which should be part of a government-funded program of reparations to Black people.
Diversity is the rationale white people came up with when we as a country decided that concern for hurt white feelings was more important than trying to repair the generational damage and inequality caused by slavery, fomented by Jim Crow, and maintained by white people’s apathy towards the damage that they–whether via their ancestors or their unabashed acceptance of the unearned privileges that attend their skin color–have caused Black people.
Ultimately, diversity isn’t even about Black people. It is about making whites feel good by giving Black people a handout. Diversity is often about tokenizing Black kids and using them to provide teaching moments for white people before they enter the world as titans of industry and politics. In a nation that has built its wealth on the wombs and blood of Black women, white people are able to advance based only on their color. They should pay. It is only fair. After all, the United States’ policy was to keep Blacks as an oppressed subclass. Chattel slavery – What is it? What did the United States do? Jim Crow? Yep. What about redlining and segregated neighbourhoods? The United States also did this. When Black people built something for themselves, Whites would come along and destroy it. And in Rosewood. And in Rosewood.
So yes–I think Black people should have set-asides as a way to begin to make up for the systematic racism and discrimination that Black people still face.
But the opposite is happening.
For example, Ed Blum, the anti-affirmative action activist behind SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, scared Big Law firm Morrison and Foerster into allowing white people with a “demonstrated commitment to diversity” to enjoy benefits of a diversity fellowship they had previously set aside for underrepresented groups. The idea that a white person who accepts a fellowship for diversity can be committed to diversity is absurd. (Any white person who accepts a diversity fellowship cannot possibly have a commitment to diversity–the very idea is absurd. (Around 1 percent of venture-capital funds are allocated to Black women. It seems that one percent is too much. Recently, a three-judge panel of 11th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked this program because it was racially biased. Blum complains that the grant program unfairly treats non-Black women, just as he did in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC when he used Asians as a Trojan Horse for white students’ grievances. We’re supposed to think that Blum cares about non-Black women and their financial futures. It’s laughable.
Take a page out of repro justice advocates’ playbook
It’s open season on affirmative action and diversity initiatives. People are worried about the future of college admissions in the wake of the Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC. We don’t want to return to Roe. We want abortions free for everyone who needs them. I want to see schools set aside seats for Black, Brown, and Poor kids.
I also want to recognize that “merit”, in a society rife with racism and bias, cannot be meritocratic. Black people are still affected by systemic racism. It makes it difficult to acquire wealth and to purchase homes in areas with schools that lead to elite institutions such as Harvard University. While having the same amount of children, districts with more nonwhite students receive $23 billion less funding each year than districts with white students. It may be the fault of progressives that we’re where we are. We ceded the argument that affirmative action was a recompense for the hundreds of years of slavery followed by the hundreds of years of white terrorism and Jim Crow in favor of outsized passion for “diversity.”
The notion that white people are, by and large, advantaged simply by virtue of their whiteness is an idea that is anathema to many white people. Many white people are opposed to the idea that whites have an advantage simply because they are white. I have never owned slaves. White people don’t seem to have a good grasp of what Black life used to be like historically, or what it is like now. White people will only have whitewashed versions if the history of Blacks in the United States is thrown into the “critical race theory” bin. (And with the history of Black people in this country being thrown into a bin labeled “critical race theory,” all that white people will be left with is whitewashed versions of history.)
