Liberation Ventures’ Statement on Supreme Court Decision on Affirmation Action
The Supreme Court has made its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, holding that universities may not have affirmative action programs that “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race.” The decision does permit “an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” and does not implicate affirmative action or DEI programs in employment, government contracting, and industry.
At Liberation Ventures, we are deeply disappointed by this decision. We consider affirmative action to be, in its essence, reparative policy. While the predominant narrative about affirmative action has been focused on the benefits of diversity, we know that at its core, affirmative action redresses past discrimination. We concur with Justice Sotomayor in her dissent, when she writes that the decision “subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”
In the coming months and years, we expect one of the ways the conversation will evolve is to examine the merits of harm-based policy as opposed to race-based. This gets to the heart of our work at Liberation Ventures. We believe that tailoring policy to address specific harms is critical. Within the Black community, this not only applies to descendents of enslaved people, but to the myriad ways that all Black people have experienced institutional racism in history and up to the present: redlining and segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching and racial violence, and more. The reparations work in Evanston offers a compelling case study for how harm-based policy can and will drive critical progress in the reparations movement.
And at the same time, it will be critical that we continue to fight for race-based policy across every facet of our society. The journey to become a true multiracial democracy goes through race-based policy, not around it; in practice, race-neutral policy directly upholds current structures of racial inequality. Policies ranging from exclusionary zoning to the War on Drugs to qualified immunity have privileged white people and disadvantaged Black people throughout our country’s history. In the context of admissions, “race-neutral” preferences for legacies, athletes, children of faculty, and relatives of donors significantly advantage white students. And, as Justice Jackson explored in extensive detail in her dissent, race-based policy has a long history in our society as a way to remedy the harms of racial oppression — including the Freedmen’s Bureau and the creation of HCBUs.
Just like in other movements to advance at-scale policy and culture change, we will face setbacks, and this will not be the last. For example, in the first several years of the coordinated marriage equality movement, 10 states banned same-sex marriage, including liberal states like California and New York. Ten years later — after dedicated investment, narrative change efforts, and movement alignment — the freedom to marry was guaranteed by the Supreme Court.
In the wake of this decision, we are learning important lessons — and our resolve to advance racial repair in this country cannot be overstated. As a movement, we must fundamentally change the conditions upon which this decision was possible; education systems that do not teach the history that constitutes the need for policies like affirmative action, structural challenges to our democracy that enabled the composition and ideology of the current court, anti-Black narratives that divide communities of color and reinforce a zero-sum mindset, and more. We know actions like this decision serve to further splinter our democracy and society, and that in order to realize a just multiracial democracy we need a real reconstruction — with true, comprehensive reparations policy — to make this country whole.
With love and power,
Liberation Ventures
