The tragedy that is the US Supreme Court
The recent ruling by the Supreme Court overruled the affirmative action in Harvard and the University of North Carolina, a policy established during the 1960s, designed to increase work and educational opportunities for groups of people that are underrepresented in various areas of society.
The Supreme Court, consisting of 6 conservative and 3 liberals stated that although the affirmative action has been overruled, schools can still consider how an individual’s race impacted their life, specifically to that applicant’s ‘unique ability to contribute to the university’. (https://www.kirkland.com/publications/kirkland-alert/2023/06/supreme-court-issues-decision-overturning-affirmative-action-in-higher-education#:~:text=In%20a%206%2D3%20decision,application%20to%20corporate%20employment%20practices.)
This creates the expectation for those whose lives are affected by race to prove the racism they face In order for their struggles as someone from a certain racial background to be valid. Angie Gabeau, the president of Harvard Black Students Association stated that these people now ‘feel obligated to trauma-dump in their applications to show how race is affecting their lives’
POCs always have to sweat more than their white counterparts. They have to go a step above in order to even compete in the same race due to their different backgrounds. Now, the affirmative action that has provided some protection has been erased and the privileged race that have all aspects of life in their favor continue to thrive while the discriminated race have to work harder and better in order to break through this discrimination and be offered the same positions.
It is a reality that schools in black communities are underfunded of a $23 billion gap between white and non white school districts (https://edbuild.org/content/23-billion/full-report.pdf)
This naturally leads to lower quality teachers to be hired to work for these schools, a lack of teachers specializing in college applications to assist the student, a lack of extracurriculars or programs available for the students to hone their skills and showcase their talent, and to do any of these will require the student’s sole effort from A to Z.
This overruling to strive for surface level equality makes it discriminatory towards POCs, expecting POCs to have the same opportunities and choices in life despite living under a system designed to be against them.
This is a standard case of structural and functional equality. Structural equality provides that everything is equal, 50/50 and does not take into consideration of intersectionality whereas functional equality provides equality that is based on the contextual analysis of society’s treatment of different groups of people. In this case, the court has applied structural equality, in that giving POCs any form of merit is discrimination and thus unequal. Functional equality would provide that considering the systemic racism and greater difficulty for POCs to be given opportunities, they should be given merit to counter for the system that works against them.
’Affirmative action was never a complete answer in the drive towards a more just society. But for generations of students who had been systematically excluded from most of America’s key institutions — it gave us the chance to show we more than deserved a seat at the table.’ — President Barack Obama
This overruling kills off the obligation to choose minorities, a problem which extends to employment as well.
Without the safeguard in place, it provides a greater opportunity for individual’s internalized racism to pick based on race, erasing the seats that POCs have tried so hard to create in a white dominated society, especially in positions of power.
It makes diversity an option, not a necessity, reducing the importance of diversity, and thus less efforts to achieve it than before.
However, the concerns raised by those against the affirmative action sounds convincing as well. Asian Americans have been disadvantaged due to the affirmative action which restricts the intake of asian american students in consideration of other races such as black or Hispanic people. This reinforces and aggravates the asian culture of overachieving, which now becomes compulsory for asian Americans to even compete with other races, even if they too were raised from poverty and areas of poor education.
It seems that the major problem holding certain people back from getting the same opportunities and guidance seems to have a stronger correlation with wealth and area of living, more so than race (although it is an undeniable fact that one’s race does influence the treatment they receive). A suggestion that I frequently come upon when reading about this topic is to change the affirmative action to consider zip codes rather than race to tackle the kind of problems similar to what I illustrated above and to give fair chances to those that have actually been greatly disadvantaged in the college application world.
