Farewell Affirmative Action?
I remember having a conversation a decade or so ago with a teacher at a private school near the liberal hotbed of Northampton, Massachusetts. He told me that all the white teachers at his school supported affirmative action, until their kids applied to college. His comment reflected a society-wide trend. We support justice in the abstract, but not if it hinders our family’s odds of getting into the right college or being hired for the perfect job. That has now changed with Justice Roberts and his six-justice majority striking down affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc, v. The Trustees and Fellows of Harvard University. Claiming that Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Colleges may still “consider an applicant’s account of how race impacted his or her life. . . .”[1]
Affirmative action as federal policy had its roots in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order №11246 which required contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, or that employees are treated during employment, without regard to the race, color, sex, or national origin.” The Johnson administration expanded the list in 1967 to include “sex.” The following year the Department of Labor required contractors to establish “goals and timetables for the prompt achievement of…
