Politics

Well I didnt want do this but Im calling kangaroo court.

I have mixed feelings about this ruling.

Affirmative action was trying to compensate for implicit anti-minority bias with explicit pro-minority bias. Today in many places, Republicans have outlawed even teaching people that this implicit bias exists with their war on critical race theory. There's a troubling recent resurgence of open racism on the right. We clearly haven't fixed the problem.

And yet, fighting institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism seems very hypocritical to me. It's much like how murder is illegal yet many states implement the death penalty. If we want our society to be a meritocracy we shouldn't grant opportunities based on the intersection of socioeconomics and genetics. This would presumably lead to a system where political and ethnic groups fight over which groups are disadvantaged and by how much, and whom the rules should favor, if it hasn't already, (the arguments made regarding Asian applicants presented in this case seem a lot like this.)

Clearly some groups were directly historically disadvantaged by the state, most notably African Americans and Native Americans. The government that did this to them should have responsibility for the consequences of these injustices, and not unrelated universities. If we are to target aid in a racial way it would make sense to do it as reparations targeted at the groups that were disadvantaged in a racial way, rather than forcing colleges to abandon meritocracy. If anything I want colleges to be more meritocratic, to the point of no longer letting people in for being legacies or donors.

Although racial disparities aren't fixed, addressing it this way is illegal and problematic. It seems the only viable alternative left to address remaining social inequities is to elevate all socioeconomically disadvantaged people in a colorblind way.

As for colleges, if they want to avoid racial bias they could omit racial identifiers and correlates like the name and location of the applicant and choose their students in a truly colorblind and meritocratic way, because without such identifiers implicit biases can't be expressed.

I'm not a fan of this ruling. Not on the merits, but on the results.

Affirmative Action fell into the "Equity" column in that "Equality - Equity - Justice" spectrum. Remember that comic with the baseball game, a fence, and 3 kids of varying heights trying to watch?

Equality says they can all go to the fence and try to watch, and everyone gets a box to stand on, though, even with the box, the shortest kid can't see over the fence.

Equity says that everyone gets boxes of varying heights so they can all see over the fence.

Justice advocates replacing the fence with a chain-link fence tat everyone can see through without the need for boxes in the first place.

It's nice to pretend that we don't need boxes, and racism is "over", but that's just pretending.

While from a first glance this may seem like a positive thing (the argument being we are illegalizing discrimination in university admissions), it's actually not, and that's backed by evidence.

Without affirmative action policies, admissions of minority racial groups to colleges and universities would likely decrease.

According to [a Princeton] study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent. While these declines are dramatic, the authors note that the long-term impact could be worse.