Let-them-eat-cake obliviousness

The Supreme Court year is over and in the last couple days they’ve been dropping two decisions a day, each with huge consequences. I got through one of them today. I heard a bit about the affirmative action ruling yesterday. This morning NPR got me up to speed. Steve Inskeep discussed the decision with Elissa Nadworny. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, said the admissions policies by Harvard and the University of North Carolina used race in ways the constitution does not allow. They may consider applicant's discussion of how race affected their individual lives, but not beyond that. This is a blow to colleges committed to a diverse campus. The University of California took decades and a complete redesign of the admissions process costing hundreds of millions of dollars to get their diversity numbers back up after the state banned affirmative action in the 1990s. Only about 200 schools and universities are highly selective and where this decision would apply. The rest are desperate enough for students this isn’t an issue. But those selective, elite institutions are the gatekeepers to power in America – eight of nine current Supremes attended Harvard or Yale. High school counselors are working with students to reframe their essays. But there is a lot of anxiety. Are some students relegated to HBCUs? Will others give up, saying college isn’t for everyone? Nadworny ended:

But, you know, over and over, research has shown that nothing is as effective at creating a racially diverse student body as considering race.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos started with Roberts’ ruling:

Roberts seemingly ends the possibility of any meaningful racial considerations in admissions in his opinion, writing that the schools’ programs “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin,” Roberts wrote. “This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” This nation’s constitutional history on race is a problematic thing for Roberts to invoke in overthrowing this precedent.

I read the bit “touchstone of an individual’s identity ... but the color of their skin” and thought that for a great number of white people, especially cops, the color of a person’s skin is indeed the “touchstone of an individual’s identity.” Put another way, skin color is all they see. They are completely blind to “challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned.” That reminds me that being blatantly hypocritical is a way of declaring how much power one has. Part of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:

The Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter. The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society. Because the Court’s opinion is not grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.

Yes, Robert’s is saying he is upholding the 14th Amendment while Sotomayor is saying he is violating it. McCarter explains the history of the case and previous affirmative action cases that led to this one. I’ll let you read them. McCarter concluded, mentioning the Students for Fair Admissions, backed by conservative groups. The backers championed this case and the one that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

Both Harvard and the SFFA hired economists to evaluate the 2019 class of Harvard to simulate what it would look like if race couldn’t be considered a factor in admissions. The Harvard economist determined that the class would have been 9% Hispanic rather than 13%, and 6% Black as opposed to 14% under affirmative action. In the arguments in the cases, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued for the universities, pointing out what ending the admissions process would mean for higher education. “When students of all races and backgrounds come to college and live together and learn together, they become better colleagues, better citizens and better leaders,” she said.

McCarter then turned to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent:

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life ... No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal racelinked 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. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain.

Jackson then added footnote to decry Justice Thomas for attacking her dissent without carefully reading it. As part of that she wrote: “JUSTICE THOMAS ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here.” McCarter added:

Both note a carve-out Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for military academies, which can still use race-based criteria for admissions. Jackson interprets that as the majority concluding “racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom.”

I was ready to insert a couple quotes from Twitter, but at the moment Twitter won’t let me read tweets without becoming a member. This is something new today. I haven’t signed up before now due to the way they and other social media sites collect information about me (I won’t be surprised if they do that when I read without signing up). But with Elon Musk in control of Twitter and watching the way he I trashing it there is no way I’m giving him anything. But back to the Supremes. One of those tweets was saying that Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan are writing their dissents not for the current time, but for a time when we can pull back from this conservative control. Those dissents will be useful in rebuilding the country. On Thursday Kai Ryssdal of the NPR show Marketplace talked to Peter Blair Henry, who has a string of business and economic credentials. Here is the main point of what they talked about: There’s a lot of data that shows diverse leadership teams at corporations perform better than non-diverse teams. This ruling removes one way in which universities produce diverse classes of graduates. That will make it harder for businesses to generate the diverse teams they need for higher performance and higher profits. This is a global disadvantage. Corporations will have to turn elsewhere to get diverse talent. They don’t know how to do that yet. Today on Marketplace Stephanie Hughes discussed one of the ways these corporations could create a diverse workforce. A corporation recruits at only a few colleges and universities. One place they tend to go is the CEO’s alma mater. Where they could go and where the administration would be delighted to see them are the HCBUs. They could also get rid of “weird” rules, like not interviewing anyone with a GPA below 3.2. They assume that’s a predictor of performance, and it isn’t. Meteor Blades of Kos wrote about another potential consequence of this ruling.

Environmental injustice comes from having situated waste dumps, chemical factories, mines, refineries, and other polluting facilities in areas where a long history of redlining has disproportionately forced Black people and other people of color to live. This is not to say that white people earning low incomes haven’t also wound up in such areas. But the racial disproportion is stark. If the Supreme Court majority were ultimately to apply its rationale in the affirmative action cases to this matter, implementing truly effective environmental justice would be next to impossible.

Laura Clawson of Kos looked at yet another potential consequence.

America First Legal, run by white nationalist former Trump aide Stephen Miller, started teeing up the next racist court decision before this one was even decided. The group has filed at least nine Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, The Washington Post reports, alleging that major companies like McDonald’s, Alaska Airlines, Hershey, Anheuser-Busch, and Nordstrom are “hiring people based solely on immutable characteristics, like race or sex, rather than qualifications or abilities.” If the EEOC doesn’t do what Miller wants, the next step would likely be a lawsuit. ... The U.S. economy continues to be shaped by the legacies of slavery, segregation, redlining, hiring discrimination, and discriminatory mass incarceration. But when it comes to deciding if someone gets into college or gets a job or promotion, groups like America First Legal have a lot of money and lawyers to argue that none of that can be taken into account, that applicants affected by those histories should be judged by terms that most highly value the type of qualifications accumulated by people whose ancestors were attending elite colleges at a time when those colleges didn’t admit Black people, and accumulating generational wealth at a time when that too was overwhelmingly off limits to Black people through a host of discriminatory practices, many of them written in law. ... The right-wing legal advocacy complex ... argument is that any effort to undo centuries of discrimination against Black people and other people of color is itself discrimination against white people.

These conservatives are demanding the right to oppress. Lalo Alcaraz tweeted a cartoon of Thomas looking down from a hole in the ceiling as he pulls up an affirmative action ladder, saying, “I’ll be taking this.” Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a person labeled “Legacy Admission” climbing a ladder up to college. There is also a young black man staring at the court carrying his ladder away. The court says, “Your ladder’s unnecessary...” In a pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos included a tweet by David Rothkopf (which I would have linked to directly if I could).

I think analyses pitting Trump v. Biden may have 2024 wrong. My sense is 2024 will be Democrats vs. the six GOP members of the Supreme Court. SCOTUS views on abortion, affirmative action, voting rights, guns, environment, LGBTQ rights will turn out a big anti-GOP majority.