The Supreme Court's decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (29 June 2023) No. 20-1199 has simplified a proposition which liberals have made very "theoretic and complex" in order to avoid facing the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life.
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Needless to say, the usual suspects are venting about how the Court's "overruling" of affirmative action fails to address "historic racism." This is yet another example of nonsensical Orwellian memes that do nothing but paralyze thought.
I honestly don't know what it means to say that we need to address historic racism. The one thing I am certain of is that history is dead and gone. Affirmative action will do nothing to save the black man lynched on a tree or the black slave torn from her child and raped... and on and on. Addressing history is like talking into the grave.
If, on the other hand, one means that we have to address the LEGACY of our history then at least we are focusing correctly on the issue that needs to be addressed. The legacy -- that is, the "what-are-we-left-with-NOW" -- is that blacks are (for the most part) economically deprived and being poor are culturally deprived and being culturally deprived are personally disabled. Punto y final.
Ohhh but we're not supposed to say that. That is somehow insensitive and ignores the richness of jazz, blues, hominy and grits. Bunk. The "richness" of the human response to oppression isn't going to help you cut it in med school.
Anyone who knows anything about child development knows that affirmative action begins at home and at about age two. In all spheres, a middle or upper middle class child is presented with worlds of opportunity, wonderment and challenge through which and with which he develops his interests and abilities. For the child who grows up in poverty -- or worse yet, in an urban "ghetto"-- the situation is the reverse. The action is all unaffirming and negative. The idea that giving such a person a "leg up" into college was a cruel deceit.
I saw it myself in law school where Blacks and Hispanics were admitted on condition they undertake remedial reading. HUH??? Really? Law is nothing if not the science of words. As Aristotle put it succinctly millenia ago; "for it is words that give us the ability to decide between the just and unjust...." (Politiks Bk 1. ch.1) If you are struggling with the syllables to make out the word, to put together a sentence, you're just not going to make it. Worse yet, you just can't DO it. And it's the same thing in physics, mathematics, medicine or any other discipline. A mid-century German politician put it this way:
"I perceived very clearly that the aim of all social activity must never be merely charitable relief, which is ridiculous and useless, but it must rather be a means to find a way of eliminating the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life - deficiencies which necessarily bring about the degradation of the individual...."
So indeed affirmative action was and is a band-aid. But it is band-aid that deceives everyone from addressing the real underlying problem: "eliminating the fundamental deficiencies in our economic and cultural life."
And that does indeed begin with medicare for all, with a affordable housing, with guaranteed livable pensions, and with a "wage that enables a man to provide for himself, to raise and family and to set aside savings." (Pope Leo XIII (1891) in case anyone was wondering.) Most of all it requires an education that allows the young person to test himself against the full range of challenges that exist from mechanics to quantum mechanics, so that he can discover what he likes and what he is good at. For, developing one's "individual potential" is not a question of becoming a doctor or lawyer, but rather of becoming a responsible and respected contributor to society.
In Germany for example, it is not a dishonor to be a "master baker." Everybody gets respect for what they bring to society's table. But,along with depressing wages, America cheapens everything.
This whole affirmative action stuff began when the Detroit and Watts riots put the fear of the Caesars into our ruling class. The slaves were revolting. Buy peace! Buy peace! Bump a few of them up into the professional classes and call it a day. But along the entire trajectory of affirmative action the condition of most Blacks has flatlined.
It was worse yet; for along with bumping up a few minorities, the ruling class set out to degrade and destroy the working class whose real incomes progressively declined for 40 years until they too have flatlined.
The liberals cab bitch and whine all they want about how the "reactionary" court has "set us back" to the Jim Crow era and blah blah blah. The Supreme Court has actually done us a favor by removing a bewitching panacea.
One has to read between the lines. C.J. Roberts wrote that the Court had never accepted affirmative action as a permanent solution. Correct. Since the Bakkee decision in 1978, it has always said that affirmative action would have to end "at sometime." In other words, the Court was willing to accept what everyone understood was a violation of Equal Protection, as temporary measure to jump start some kind of Black "middle class."
Most of what Americans call "liberalism" is a blindfold that allows liberals to forget the material sacrifices THEY as a class must make in order to achieve the society they say they want. In removing the blinder, the Court has actually forced us to look elsewhere than at college admissions offices for solutions.
In so far as admissions offices are concerned, I would recommend reading the dissent of Justice Douglas in DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) 416 U.S. 312, No one -- absolutely no one --- can accuse Douglas of being a toady to reactionaries...and yet this is what he wrote:
"The Equal Protection Clause commands the elimination of racial barriers, not their creation in order to satisfy our theory as to how society ought to be organized. .... A segregated admissions process creates suggestions of stigma and caste no less than a segregated classroom, and in the end it may produce that result despite its contrary intentions. One other assumption must be clearly disapproved: that blacks or browns cannot make it on their individual merit. That is a stamp of inferiority that a State is not permitted to place on any lawyer. ... So far as race is concerned, any state-sponsored preference to one race over another in that competition is in my view "invidious" and violative of the Equal Protection Clause.” (Id., at pp. 343-44.)
Douglas also makes good reading in comparison to the dissents of justices Jackson and Sotomayor; for, way before woke, Douglas was very aware of the cultural discrimination in so-called "objective" measurements like the SAT/LSAT. But, he was also prophetically aware of the problem in creating a cascade of conflicting preferences based on race, national origin and other "cognized" categories. At the end of the day, when it comes to any technique, cultural values and perspectives have nothing to do with it: either you know how to tune a V-8 engine, or you don't.
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