Posted on 04/26/2014 7:09:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
Amidst all the opinions out of the nation's highest court on Tuesday -- majority and minority, concurring in part and dissenting in part, or just too vague to classify -- was there any clear message? Yes. Definitely. But you had to peer through all the legal haze, an admix of angry rhetoric and discreet evasions, in order to divine where the Supreme Court of the United States is headed on the always simmering issue of race-based admissions to the country's colleges and universities. But it's finally headed in the right direction, however many zigs and zags the learned justices may have taken along the way.
If you listen carefully to the general drift of all these different decisions, that sound you can hear in the distance, maybe only the far distance, is the long awaited death knell for racial preferences in higher education. Yes, time is running out for all those racial quotas -- for that is what has always lurked behind the euphemism Affirmative Action, which can have decidedly negative impact on those students who don't belong to the favored race, ethnicity, class or whatever bias you prefer.
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If the essence of law is not logic but experience, to borrow an observation from the ever-observant Oliver Wendell Holmes, then this assemblage of legal opinions pro and con and in-between indicates that experience is slowly catching up to logic where racial preferences are concerned. And ending them.
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From its beginning, what is called affirmative action has had a paradox at its center: Any preference given applicants who belong to the preferred group amounts to discrimination against those who don't. That's always been the essential injustice of Jim Crow systems no matter what elevated names they are assigned -- whether "separate but equal" or "affirmative action" -- and no matter which Americans they favor, and so necessarily disfavor others. There's no getting around that essential truth no matter how hard judges like Sonia Sotomayor or Ruth Bader Ginsburg try.
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Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg are scarcely the first to deck out an essential injustice in the language of high principle. It's almost a tradition in American jurisprudence. See the works of Roger B. Taney (he of the infamous Dred Scott decision) or Henry B. Brown, author of Plessy v. Ferguson almost half a century later, from which all kinds of racial segregation flowed. Happily, there's always a great if lone dissenter like John Marshall Harlan who sees right through their game, or just a waffler like Anthony M. Kennedy who blows the whistle on it, as he did in this week's majority opinion.
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Yes, there are instances where some forms of racial discrimination may be justified on a temporary basis in order to break up a whole, greater system of racial discrimination long embedded in law, custom and popular passion. Think of the crosstown busing that was necessary -- for a while -- to end racial segregation in the nation's schools and so further liberty and justice for all in this one nation all too divisible.
Unfortunately, the legal expedients we're told are only temporary have a way of becoming permanent, dragging on for years, even decades, as busing did. Only now may such arbitrary measures be fading, though not till after they ushered in an era of resegregated school systems in city after city. Affirmative action, too, has tended to become a permanent institution, with its own overstaffed bureaucracy and vested interests, in all too many of the country's institutions of "higher" learning, which wind up practicing a low form of racial discrimination.
That's why the most hopeful comment in this miscellany of opinions the Supreme Court handed down Tuesday came from one of the only two justices on the court who would prolong affirmative action/racial quotas in American college admissions. The comment was embedded deep in Justice Sotomayor's outburst disguised as an impartial opinion, and you might have had to listen carefully to the summary of it she read from the bench to discern the ray of hope deep in its glowering text. It came when she accused the court of "permitting the majority to use its numerical advantage to change the rules mid-contest and forever stack the deck against racial minorities in Michigan."
Michigan is where the voting public dealt racial preferences a major blow by outlawing them in that state's public universities. As if the voters had realized that the simplest, most direct way to end racial discrimination in college admissions is to end racial discrimination in college admissions. How about that?
But that's just the kind of simple justice Madam Justice Sotomayor deplored in her opinion -- except, except for one brief comment that implied some hope for justice in the future. Did you catch it? It came when she was berating the court for changing the rules of the game "mid-contest." Hmm. So if the debate over affirmative action has reached its midpoint, that means this pernicious practice must have had a beginning and, yes, will someday have an end. And someday all students applying for admission to a state university will be judged without regard to their race or other irrelevancies. What a glorious day that will be, and this mixed bag of decisions out of the court Tuesday indicates that day is coming, however slowly.
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Yes, the college admission process can be rigged to benefit your favorite minorities, but only at the cost of penalizing others. The question is Cui bono? Who benefits? (This being a legal discussion, it would not be complete without a Latin phrase or two.) Black and Hispanic applicants may enjoy an advantage under affirmative action, but Jews and Asian-Americans need not apply. Indeed, one of the most evident results of affirmative action is to limit their numbers at the country's more prestigious universities.
Just why justices like Sonia Sotomayor should think it awful to "stack the deck" against certain minorities but not against others may be one of those mysteries best left to her own law and conscience, for we can't think of any ready explanation for her selective indignation besides the old, obvious one: blind, invincible prejudice.
The wheels of justice, they say, grind slow but exceeding fine. Sometimes so fine that justice is hard to discern. But the day of reckoning for affirmative action is coming, however slowly and contentiously. And it'll be a great day when it finally
What you said. 3rd world countries have governments that make the law up as they go. Justice depends on who you know and what connections one has in the government. That’s exactly what the left would create in America. It doesn’t even matter if they mean well. They are substituting the rule of man for the rule of law!
Damn straight they gotta end it. Before whites become the new minority and eligible for special treatment under AA.
College is one thing; I can't wait until this discrimination ends in the WORKPLACE. In my experience (within Department of Defense and their contractors), the NUMBER ONE CRITERIA for promotion into senior management in some organizations is membership in a protected class. Yet they still fail to meet their quotas (usually based on the percentage in the general population). I've told my organization's management why, with statistics to back it up, but no one is interested in the truth. The truth is that the percentage of protected classes who have the education, leadership experience, professionalism, ambition, and experience leading major projects/studies is very small; they are already tremendously over represented in management, and generally much less qualified than those who were passed over to give them this opportunity.
.....”She was put there because this government is bound and determined to devolve this country into a 3rd world shithole.”
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Agreed with Gaffer.
I still remember a cartoon from 1964. A long line of men are waiting for jobs. Way in the back is one Black man.
The personnel manager ignores those at the front of the line and points to the Black man and says...”I believe YOU are Next!”
When the Mexicans become the majority population in the country will they still be a minority?
Not to worry about Blacks they kill 72% of their babies before they are born otherwise it would be a battle between blacks and hispanics for control of the country..
Unfortunately, the way the law is written (intentionally) whites can never receive "minority status" under EEO law. The legal definition is not based on numbers, but upon the concept of "traditionally disadvantaged persons". They are Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian, and women.
Affirmative action and Obama has left a bad taste in white America. AA was used to insure that institutions did not find creative ways to keep out QUALIFIED blacks. It was also test authority given to people of color on how they will move onward and how they will treat whites onward despite the past mistreatment by whites. In other words, is AA and power to be used to create a unified society or will it be used as revenge. Many whites are concluding people of color, blacks especially have used their power of equality in general to revenge. I remember when a young black woman was asked about blacks using similar methods racist whites used in the past to resolve an issue, her response was, “two wrongs do not make it right, but it sure feels good!”. This remark was made by a young black woman after decades of AA and acknowledgement of past mistreatments. Obama only cemented this by his hesitancy to deal with black civil rights transgressions on whites and other people of color. If the US wanted a nonwhite POTUS, their first impression of one probably be best served by a Hispanic or Asian. Atleast these two groups are split 2 to 1 politically. Blacks voted 9 to 1 and instinctively practice tribalism when a conflict develops between them and outside groups. Pres Obama and AG Holder best supports this point along with the Congressional Black caucus behavior.
My prediction, Obama will be the first and last black POTUS for a long long time.
“Affirmative Action is a crutch you’d rather not have to depend on in the first place. So why be bothered with it any more than you have to?”
For money; what other motive is needed?
Not hers. That chick is digging her grave with a spoon just like Benjamin Franklin warned. In that pic she looks like she’s found about seventy pounds.
There are two (related) trends in this country that are going to affirmative action:
1. The growing population of Latin Americans -- who now exceed black Americans as the largest minority group in the U.S. These Latin Americans are considered "minorities" and benefit from affirmative action even in places where they outnumber any other racial/ethnic group. It's no coincidence (but it's still amazing, considering the politics of the state) that California -- where this trend is the most obvious -- was one of the first states to ban racial/ethnic preferences in college admissions.
2. Mixed-race and inter-ethnic marriages. This is where affirmative action plays out in a way that is so ludicrous that even its strongest supporters see the idiocy of it. I have close friends in "mixed marriages" where one parent is of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin and the other is from Latin America. In one case both parents are white Europeans but one of them was born in South America. Their children -- who look like something out of a National Geographic article about Ireland, Germany or Scandinavia -- are considered "minorities" as long as they want to call themselves "Hispanics" and can produce a Latin American birth certificate for one parent as evidence. As these kids are given preferential treatment in college admissions, public sector employment, etc., you will see the likes of Jesse Jackson and even Sonia Sotomayor blow their lids completely and demand an end to such a farce.
Squeaky wheel gets oiled. Looks like they poured most of it in her hair
“The personnel manager ignores those at the front of the line and points to the Black man and says...”I believe YOU are Next!”
Could you imagine that was 50 years ago, and all those promises about the benefits of hiring less-qualified “minorities” have turned into such a nightmare for those very same people? They are even further back in the rear-view mirror, with no hope of catching up until the same is expected of them as is expected of white/Asian men (I won’t include women in that because nobody expects much of them, either).
Affirmative action is the official indication that the government no loger believes blacks, Hispanics, and women are equal to white and Asian men. The only reason AA is in the news now is because the race hustlers want white women removed as beneficiaries, and those white women are making noise about it. They are reaping what they’ve sown at our expense; tough #%&@. As long as it is legal to discriminate against white guys, I couldn’t give a hoot about much else.
Affirmative Action is why I avoid any “minority” doctor or Naturapath....
If Sotomayor personally experienced discrimination it was not because she is a Latina but because she is UGLY.
Agree with the article in general but disagree with some particulars. Forced busing was never necessary to end discrimination. I haven’t yet read a reasonable explanation of why forced busing was necessary unless the proponents really believe black students are inferior to white students and cannot learn unless a white student is sitting next to them in a classroom. Now that’s really racist.
The truth is petty fascists like Sotomayor never want AA (or as I like to call it...Affirmative Discrimination) to end. They will always want preferences and will always shout “racism” when their demands are not met.
When I was a freshman or sophomore in college about 1972-73, I had a sociology prof who discussed it and I remember him saying he believed AA would be phased out within 25 years. To me, if AA has't achieved it's stated goal by now, it's never going to achieve it. The Supremes made the right decision in upholding Michigan's Constitution.
There was NOTHING "necessary" about busing.
It was a Leftist revenge gig designed to retaliate against whites by putting their kids in danger.
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