Supreme Court does a reset on race and opportunity in America

Fifty years after the first legal challenge was filed to stop racial preferences in university admissions, and after multiple decisions struggled to find a coherent legal framework to support it, a new conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has definitively shut the door on the practice.

Thursday’s decision was unsurprising but still unsettling. It comes at a time when the nation has a renewed focus on its legacy of racism but has come to no consensus on how to move forward. Since the court ruled unanimously in a 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, that segregated schools were unconstitutional, it has failed to find a remedy to repair the damage from that very segregation.

Affirmative action, a policy rooted in the Nixon administration’s plan to give more government contracts to minorities, was controversial from the start — but never more so than when it changed the admissions process in the elite colleges and graduate schools that are the pipelines to leadership in many fields. The question remains: How can a society devise programs to remedy discrimination while upholding the egalitarian promise of individual merit?

OSTRICH-LIKE HOPE

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described the majority’s view of “colorblindness for all” as an ostrichlike hope. “But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in real life,” she wrote. “Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better.”

Five of the six Supreme Court cases challenging affirmative action in the past five decades were brought by white plaintiffs. While those individuals all lost, those rulings effectively hollowed out any legal protection for race-conscious admissions. Quotas were rejected in 1978, and by 2016 the court had only a one-vote majority to support the idea that racial diversity in a student body would benefit everyone. This was closer to the right answer, but the present sharp ideological split among the justices has moved the court away from practical, compromise solutions.

The two cases that finally dismantled it all were brought by students of Asian heritage who claimed Harvard College and the University of North Carolina discriminated based on their race. And they had evidence that Asian applicants, despite higher test scores and other achievement measures, got lower ratings on subjective measures, much like some schools including Harvard had done to Jewish applicants in the past.

REMOVING OBSTACLES

While race-conscious admissions was an imprecise and imperfect process, it clearly made great advances in opening a path for many minorities to thrive. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, writing the majority opinion, said that colleges could continue to permit students to discuss how race affected their life experiences; the opinion did not offer any other prescription for how to shape a body of students with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

So how do we now remove these barriers to social mobility, to fulfill our moral obligation of offering equal opportunity? Colleges can look at whether an applicant would be the first in their family to attend college, or consider poverty rates in the schools attended or income levels in the applicants’ ZIP codes. More need-blind financial aid and high school mentoring have served to expand the admissions pool at some institutions. These measures and others must be tried or reconfigured; some are not likely to work, at least not for some time.

The University of California system, which sought alternatives after a 1996 ballot initiative that banned racial preferences in state schools, has failed since then to improve the demographic diversity of its classes, especially in its top schools. Eliminating standardized test scores has yet to raise the number of applications from students of color and from low-income households, according to other early studies.

BIG CHANGES NEEDED

Despite affirmative action’s successes, did it manage to serve only as a bandage on the nation’s larger problems? A lot of energy has been spent arguing how to split the admissions pie for the freshman class at Harvard College and other elite institutions. But far too many talented kids of color never did and never will apply to college, let alone the top ones, because of unchanged disparities in race and economic status, particularly in the nation’s largest cities and suburbs where the better school districts have long-standing patterns of segregation and more expensive housing costs.

The many consequences of this ruling in arenas far beyond education are yet to be known. We must remember that our nation’s strength comes from its diversity in all its forms as well as its unbounded promise of opportunity for all.