Signaled Virtue

An article the Atlantic ran on the front page of its app for a few days claims that the elimination of legalized racism in America is actually the same as the “separate but equal” doctrine. A pretty easy thing to disprove. But there's so much bullshit in this one that it merits a more detailed breakdown and deconstruction.

Opening Story

I'll skip over most of the opening section, which tokenizes a Chinese-American's story of racial discrimination in order to make the authors appear to be champions of Asian anti-racism. The nature of that illusion is made clear later, when the authors become explicitly racist against Asian people. There's only one part worth discussing in depth here:

Gong Lum sued, appealing to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. All nine justices ruled in favor of school segregation, citing the “separate but equal” doctrine from 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

“A child of Chinese blood, born in and a citizen of the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the law by being classed by the state among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes,” the Court summarized in Gong Lum v. Rice on November 21, 1927.

A century from now, scholars of racism will look back at today’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action the way we now look back at Gong Lum v. Rice—as a judicial decision based in legal fantasy. Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.

The bogus legal argument in Gong Lum v. Rice and in Plessy v. Ferguson – that “separate but equal” was an acceptable standard to apply – was wonderfully destroyed by a single phrase in Brown v. Board of Education: “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Yet the authors don't quote Brown. They instead note correctly that these facilities were never equal in practice. But the choice to shun the poetic language in Brown lays the groundwork for what they will do in the rest of this article: portray the legal system and its language as evil tools for racists, instead of a stalwart bastion of rights which only bent its knee when pressed from all sides. If they had quoted Brown, they would need to give credit to a system they want the readers to view as irredeemably evil.

Later, the authors will attempt to preempt a form of criticism which couches itself in the same court case they quote earlier: in Justice Harlan's dissent for Plessy v. Ferguson, he writes,

Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law... In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.

The weakness of their attack on Justice Harlan's opinion will be detailed when I come to that part of the article. But it is worth pointing out the irony of the authors glossing over initially, and later actively attempting to discredit, the ultimate rebuttal to legal racism which was uttered at the same time as the story they cite in order to advance their own new form of racism.

Establishing the Strawmen

(Note: emphasis is from the original article.)

The Supreme Court has effectively outlawed affirmative action using two court cases brought on by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized by a legal strategist named Edward Blum, SFFA filed suit on behalf of Asian American applicants to Harvard as well as white and Asian applicants to UNC to claim that their equal-protection rights were violated by affirmative action. Asian and white Americans are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?

I was shocked, first reading this, to see the authors resort to explicit racism in their argument. I thought they were smarter than to allow people to see them for who they really are. But they must've read the polls and realized most people already see through them, so they figured it was about time they stopped hiding their true feelings.

The pure indignation dripping from that sentence – “[Asian Americans] are overrepresented in the student body at selective private and public colleges and universities that are well funded and have high graduation rates, but they are the victims?” – how dare those uppity Asians wish to participate at the level of elite institutions, how dare so many of them try to, how dare they think themselves entitled to a chance made on the basis of effort – is beautiful. I couldn't have written a better parody of Dr. Kendi myself (I am not familiar enough with Dr. Jayakumar to say if it fits her as well).

If I have to tell you why there's something fucked-up about saying that Asians aren't victims of racial discrimination, you're part of the problem and this blog post won't change that anyway. It's just worth pointing out in case you missed it.

This is indicative of a larger fantasy percolating throughout society: that white Americans, who, on average, stand at the more advantageous end of nearly every racial inequity, are the primary victims of racism.

Huh, now the Asians are gone. That's weird. It's almost like if they were in this part it would fall apart completely.

The authors here bring up an entirely different discussion which has nothing to do with anti-Asian racism. There may indeed be a fantasy gaining credence among some circles of American society. It has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation around affirmative action, and the authors know it, which is why they specifically exclude the plaintiffs and primary victims – Asians – from this sentence.

This fantasy is fueling the grievance campaigns of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair for everyone—and that affirmative action is unfair for white and Asian American applicants.

I can believe the first sentence. I've seen enough YouTube videos of crazy motherfuckers saying shit like “whites are the victims of racism” wearing MAGA gear that I can believe it. It also has nothing to do with the second sentence which follows it. Literally nothing. We went from the MAGA hat wearing crowd to people who think discriminating by race (a.k.a. racism) is bad. Either this is a rough draft they accidentally published, or the authors are intending to subtly smear anti-racist advocates as Trump supporters. You decide.

The authors also make an impressive claim: “Americans who oppose affirmative action have been misled into believing that the regular admissions metrics are fair...” Bullshit. Nobody thinks college admissions, especially into this kind of college, are fair – even without the affirmative action. Legacy admissions are pretty widely known, and everyone knows that enough money gets you anywhere. Was there anyone who was seriously surprised that people were paying to get into USC? I was surprised it was technically illegal! Legal versions of this shit are how admissions works everywhere else!

On that subject, people were really pissed at the parents and students who got in from the USC scandal. It strikes me now that the anger was wholly misplaced. The one and only subject of their rage should have been USC (no, not even Rick Singer. USC made the game; Rick just helped people play along). As I said in my previous post, there is not one person who can argue in good faith that these bougie schools can't admit more than they already do. USC has an endowment of $7 billion but we're expected to believe they only have enough room for 21,000 undergrads. ASU, which enrolls 100,000 undergrads on a $2 billion endowment (and $4 billion budget, slightly more than half of USC's entire endowment) must be cooking the books.

It is a fantasy that race is considered as an admissions factor only through affirmative action. But the Court endorsed SFFA’s call for “race neutral” admissions in higher education—effectively prohibiting a minor admissions metric such as affirmative action, which closes racial inequities in college admissions, while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. Against all evidence to the contrary, the Court claimed: “Race-neutral policies may thus achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without … affirmative action policies.” The result of the Court’s decision: a normality of racial inequity. Again.

With our interlude about USC complete, we return to the authors' strawmen. The authors falsely portray race as a minor admissions metric when the measurable* effects it's had on Asian Americans suggests it is quite major. They are also glib when they state that affirmative action “closes racial inequities in college admissions.” As many before me have noted, Harvard and Friends have intentionally and repeatedly declined to release information about the kinds of people within races being admitted to these schools (which would answer questions such as: “What is the proportion of black immigrants being admitted versus black descendants of the enslaved? What are the average and median income levels of those you admit from each race?” A much better article from the Atlantic about affirmative action laid it out:

...Harvard picks classes that look like today’s racially diverse America; indeed, most undergraduates are students of color. But the school does not actually reflect America. Research... shows that Harvard has 15 times as many students from the richest fifth of the population as the poorest fifth. About as many students come from the top 1 percent by income as the bottom 60 percent... Likewise, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill claims to be “the University of the people.” Yet students in the top income quintile are 16 times as numerous on campus as those in the bottom fifth.

When people hear “closes racial inequities in college admissions” they think “working- and middle-class black Americans are being admitted at populationally-proportional rates,” which isn't true and was never going to be.

*(It is worth noting that the specific manner which Harvard demoted Asians in its applications process – through “personality” – is identical to how they implemented their demotion of Jews in the quota era.)

The authors state a good point in a bad way with “...while effectively permitting the major admissions metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions.” The lawsuit was about affirmative action, not legacy admissions or the “affirmative action for whites” that is collegiate athletics recruiting. A lawsuit was just filed challenging the legacy part; in a fair, just, color-blind society (apologies for the redundant statements) that lawsuit will be upheld and legacy admissions struck down. But the whole thing is a ratrace for elitist kooks and nothing short of a forced acknowledgment from the Ivy Leagues that they could admit students who need good education but choose not to will cause the situation to change. The problem is the very existence of selectivity in college admissions; the affirmative action, legacy admissions, and other conversations are all distractions.

Oh, but wait, Dr. Kendi has previously gone on record claiming that the SAT, the exam which eliminated racial barriers to entry for college** (see further below), is racist. Whoops. I'm guessing that's what they meant by “major criteria.”

This is what the Court considers to be fair admissions for students, because the judges consider the major admissions metrics to be “race-neutral”—just as a century ago, the Court considered Mississippi public schools to be “separate but equal.”

I see what you did there, guys! You think parallel sentence structures connected by the phrase “just as” are going to force me to view two wildly different things in a similar way! That's so funny. But just phrasing things similarly doesn't make them the same. They have to actually be similar for that to work. I know, shocking, but true!

The inherently self-contradictory “separate but equal” mentality – which actively denied black Americans the right to simply exist in the same spaces as white Americans – is not the same thing as anti-racism (in the authors' lingo, “race-neutrality” or “color-blindness”), which actively provides the right to be considered equal under the law.

The Constitution always guaranteed equality under the law. The Constitution is also just a scrap of paper – the fact that its principal authors owned slaves shows just how little it has been respected since its inception. Nowhere is this more clear than in the Dred Scott majority decision:

[The Constitution] proceeds to say: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.'

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included...

The incredible distortion and double-think wielded by those who joined this decision is emblematic of the early treatment of the Constitution's radical ideas. Yet the abolitionists correctly recognized that the Constitution prohibited slavery, regardless of how the self-interested slaveowners in the United States chose to distort it.

That the authors characterize the Constitutionally-faithful decision in the affirmative-action Supreme Court case, the case which was decided in favor of equality under the law, in the same terms as the bastardized cases which dismantled the Constitution's guarantee of legal equality, would be hilarious if it wasn't so lacking in self-awareness.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, recognized “the inherent folly of that approach” but doesn’t recognize the inherent folly of his “race neutral” approach.

History repeats sometimes without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”

It isn't clear what the authors mean by “inherent folly,” but given that they remark this about the “race neutral” approach, it seems likely they are making an argument I’ve heard elsewhere: colorblindness is actually the same thing as ignoring racism. (See this WaPo article's tagline: “Pretending that racism doesn't exist only delays real change.”)

As I said in a previous post: do the authors think we're all going to just accept that the principle of not being a racist fuckhead when you interact with people is actually a form of ignoring racism altogether? Do the people making this argument think that telling anti-racists that they're actually pretending racism doesn't exist is a logically coherent argument? Do they think that they can successfully portray doing an incredibly powerful thing – actually effecting anti-racism by practicing it – as an ineffective action?

It makes sense why the authors here have become so unguarded with their language, allowing their anger to turn their writing into nonsensical hyperbole. I mean, if I made arguments as ironclad as these and had polls telling me the vast majority thought I was a moron, I'd be pissed too! OK, maybe I wouldn't become racist towards Asians, but Karens become racist all the time when they're angry, so clearly this is common behavior.

The Court today claimed, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race- based college admissions in sight.” In actuality, twenty years have passed, with no end to racial inequity in sight.

Let's assume that the authors here mean institutional/systemic inequity, and not racism perpetuated at the individual level. (I won't even speculate that the authors could possibly mean the latter because then it would become far too easy to ridicule them.) The next paragraph makes it clear that they view inequity through the lends of representation levels. This idea has been promoted by Dr. Kendi before: if students at colleges do not represent their underlying populations to the same proportions, racism is afoot. If the percentage of black students at University A does not closely equate the percentage of black students in the country at large, it can't possibly be anything but the system.

Of course, if there is a large discrepancy for any group's representation, the sources should be investigated. But Dr. Kendi never said he was in favor of an investigation. He instead would pronounce your school guilty without trial; judge, jury, and executioner of racism (and statistical randomness, and the differences attributable to the fact that individuals do not behave in neat group patterns 100% of the time, but clearly all that was complicit in the racism part).

In addition to ignoring Stats 101, this absolutism fundamentally negates black (and everyone else's) individuality. In demanding we derive this specific conclusion – again, without investigation! – from proportionality differences, the students who choose trade school over college, go to college later than others usually do, and otherwise follow “nontraditional” paths in life have their stories erased. In the authors' wonderland, the individuals making these decisions are actually perpetrators/victims (it's sometimes hard to tell) of racism. In the real world where the rest of us live, these individuals have a leg up on the students who attend college early because they increase their control over their lives (doesn't it seem oppressive to you that we should all go to college at 18, work a 9-5 for the next 50 something years, and retire at the predefined age?), they gain real work experience without the sheltered and unrealistic collegiate environment, and they will almost certainly save money.

Black, Latino, and Indigenous students continue to be underrepresented at the top 100 selective public universities. After affirmative action was outlawed at public universities in California and Michigan in the 1990s, Black enrollment at the most selective schools dropped roughly 50 percent, in some years approaching early-1970s numbers. This lack of diversity harms both students of color and white students.

A lack of diversity does indeed harm everyone in the cohort. It's also the direct result of being a selective school. The obvious case is that the students who attend these elite institutions have no exposure to those the school deemed unworthy of admission by some arbitrary, albeit anti-racist metric (i.e., SAT cutoff of 1400).

**(Sidebar about the anti-racist nature of standardized testing:

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation…

…that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms…

This is from a review of Jerome Karabel’s book “The Chosen.”

Blind admissions – the practice of assessing only a candidate’s material and potential contribution – was/is such an effectively anti-racist measure that the racists had to/are currently trying to reduce its influence.)

The deeper case is made effortlessly in this Socratic dialogue:

“Let’s return to those elite colleges, Glaucon. What does it mean to say that a college is ‘elite’?”

“It means that they accept only those students who have the most impressive academic credentials, Socrates.”

“In other words, it is difficult to gain entry to those colleges.”

“Indeed it is.”

“Is that incidental to their appeal, or are they pursued so ardently precisely because of that difficulty?”

“I must admit, exclusivity is indeed core to their appeal. We are impressed by someone’s college in inverse proportion to that college’s accessibility.”

“And thus is not the quest to make elite college attendance more accessible a charade as well, my dear Glaucon? Would achieving that goal not degrade the very goods that elite college educations are meant to provide?”

The lack of diversity (not just racial) in these schools is the product of selectivity. The only way to actually fix this is to eliminate selectivity. But these elite schools' profitability (or “surplus in budgets” given that most of them are grifting off the IRS with a bullshit non-profit designation) depends on the ability for them to place its students into a sort of “caste.” Affirmative action recipients are rarely people without money and as a group form a tiny percentage of the student body. Affirmative action is a smokescreen.

Note that a similar statement made elsewhere (incl. the Wall Street Journal – paywalled link not included here) – that the California affirmative action ban led to reduced black college enrollment across the board – is just plain false, although politically convenient. From here:

The question need not be posed hypothetically. California actually did ban affirmative action in its state-funded colleges in 1996. And this ban did not hurt students of color. It didn’t reduce college enrollment for black and Hispanic students; it simply re-shuffled them throughout both the University of California and Cal State systems. Many of them did end up at less prestigious schools, but those schools better matched their incoming academic credentials.

There's a link to a research article in this paragraph, and this is from that article's abstract:

Comparing the pre- and post-Proposition 209 statistics by race and gender demonstrates that women and minorities have not lost any ground in employment, education, or public contracting as a result of Proposition 209's prohibition of discrimination and preferential treatment.

In its reply brief in the UNC case, SFFA argued that the University of California system enrolls “more underrepresented minorities today than they did under racial preferences,” referencing the increase of Latino students at UC campuses from 1997 to 2019. But accounting for the increase in Latino students graduating from high school, those gains should be even larger. There’s a 23-point difference between the percentage of high-school graduates in California who are Latino and the percentage of those enrolled in the UC system.

This is a repeat of the proportionality argument; the authors unintentionally reinforce the argument I made regarding the previous paragraph.

Declines in racial representation and associated harms extend to graduate and professional programs. The UC system produced more Black and Latino medical doctors than the national average in the two decades before affirmative action was banned, and dropped well below the national average in the two decades after.

This, despite the fact that the system claimed it is near pre-AA ban levels of racially-diverse enrollment? It merits more investigation – two decades is a long time – but isn't really a point in the authors' favor. Especially when there is another factor which has exploded in prevalence over the last two decades: tuition inflation.

Underrepresentation of Black, Latino, and Indigenous students at the most coveted universities isn’t a new phenomenon, it isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t because there is something deficient about those students or their parents or their cultures. Admissions metrics both historically and currently value qualities that say more about access to inherited resources and wealth— computers and counselors, coaches and tutors, college preparatory courses and test prep—than they do about students’ potential. And gaping racial inequities persist in access to each of those elements—as gaping as funding for those so-called equal schools in the segregated Mississippi Delta a century ago.

The “it isn't a coincidence” point is once again the “disproportionality-is-racism” argument, previously addressed. Everything else said here is generally correct, but the authors' examples of inherited wealth fall short. Namely, test prep in of itself is worthless. Controlling for all confounding factors finds that “studying” for the supposedly-unstudiable SAT raises your score by... no more than 20 points. As that article notes, part of the confounding factors is wealth and other factors that don't actually relate to the SAT, so the truth is nuanced: richer kids who get test prep do do better on the SAT... because they're better educated in general, not because of test prep (which, again, does nothing).

Ironically, the authors make the clearest case yet (both here implicitly, and in the next paragraph explicitly) for class-based action over and above affirmative action. Also note that incredible strawman “it isn’t because there is something deficient about [them]” – the people making that argument are actual racists, and the authors are writing this article for a very different crowd, so this sentence seems like a slam dunk win when it’s actually just something everyone reasonable already agreed with.

So what about class? Class-based or income-based interventions disproportionately help white students too, because their family’s low income is least likely to extend to their community and schools. Which is to say that low-income white Americans are far and away less likely than low-income Black and Latino Americans to live in densely impoverished neighborhoods and send their kids to poorly resourced public schools. Researchers find that 80 percent of low-income Black people and 75 percent of low-income Latino people reside in low-income communities, which tend to have lesser-resourced schools, compared with less than 50 percent of low-income white people. (Some Asian American ethnic groups are likely to be concentrated in low-income communities, while others are not; the data are not disaggregated to explore this.) Predominately white school districts, on average, receive $23 billion more than those serving the same number of students of color.

The authors note that class-based interventions are bad because they are too good for white students. Remind me again how the American college should strive to be more equitable – except not really because then too many white students benefit? The authors' statistics look impressive so long as we ignore the fact that most poor people are Native American, black, and Hispanic and that their $23 billion figure is across all white districts, poor and rich, and as just stated there are far more poor black people than white people. The funding gap is a massive problem, but doesn't reveal any deleterious effect of class-based affirmative action. Again, the smokescreen gets in our eyes. These schools can and are able to admit low income students of multiple racial groups. They don't because then their “not-for-profit” margins would be slightly diminished.

When admissions metrics value SAT, ACT, or other standardized-test scores, they predict not success in college or graduate school, but the wealth or income of the parents of the test takers. This affects applicants along racial lines, but in complex ways. Asian Americans, for example, have higher incomes than African Americans on average, but Asian Americans as a group have the highest income inequality of any racial group. So standardized tests advantage more affluent white Americans and Asian ethnic groups such as Chinese and Indian Americans while disadvantaging Black Americans, Latino Americans, Native Americans, and poorer Asian ethnic groups such as Burmese and Hmong Americans. But standardized tests, like these other admissions metrics, are “race neutral”?

Most of this paragraph was previously rebutted with my discussions on standardized testing, dispersed throughout this post. But it’s good to see acknowledge that Asian-Americans are a large group with different constituents. They almost come close to acknowledging nuance – but they miss the slam dunk. They fail to mention that there’s nowhere on that copy-and-paste racial disclosure form that allows you to say you’re a Hmong American. Hmong Americans are treated as all other Asian Americans for the purposes of race, and as the evidence gathered for the Supreme Court case demonstrated, Asian Americans were discriminated against as a group. In other words, while it should affect these groups in complex ways in the authors’ world, in the real world Harvard is racist in very predictable ways.

Standardized tests mostly favor students with access to score-boosting test prep. A multibillion-dollar test-prep and tutoring industry was built on this widespread understanding. Companies that openly sell their ability to boost students’ scores are concentrated in immigrant and Asian American communities. But some Asian American ethnic groups, having lower incomes, have less access to high-priced test-prep courses.

The snake oil industry is very profitable, yet I’ve never seen anyone base their argument for the effectiveness of snake oil on the profitability of the industry. I already quoted an article which brings together all the scientific research disproving the notion that the test-prep industry has any effectiveness – I'd just like to point out that the authors clearly view the readers of this article as a bunch of suckers who can't do Google searches on their own. The sad part is they're right. Googling to disprove your own ideas crashes against the weight of most people's cognitive biases.

Besides all of this, the tests themselves have racist origins. Eugenicists introduced standardized tests a century ago in the United States to prove the genetic intellectual superiority of wealthy white Anglo-Saxon men. These “experimental” tests would show “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture,” the Stanford University psychologist and eugenicist Lewis Terman wrote in his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence. Another eugenicist, the Princeton University psychologist Carl C. Brigham, created the SAT test in 1926. SAT originally stood for “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” aptitude meaning “natural ability to do something.”

Again, previously rebutted (this one almost entirely in the sidebar on the anti-racist origins of standardized testing in education).

Some selective colleges that went test-optional during the pandemic welcomed some of their most racially and economically diverse classes, after receiving more applications than normal from students of color. For many students of color, standardized tests have been a barrier to applying, even before being a barrier to acceptance. Then again, even where colleges and universities, especially post-pandemic, have gone test-optional, we can reasonably assume or suspect that students who submit their scores are viewed more favorably.

They could have done that before by admitting more students. Instead they abandoned the shackles of fairness to engage in the creation of their own favored class composition. Again, smokescreen.

When admissions committees at selective institutions value students whose parents and grandparents attended that institution, this legacy metric ends up giving preferential treatment to white applicants. Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants for the classes of 2014–19 at Harvard were white.

College athletes are mostly white and wealthy—because most collegiate sports require resources to play at a high level. White college athletes make up 70 to 85 percent of athletes in most non-revenue-generating sports (with the only revenue-generating sports usually being men’s basketball and football). And student athletes, even ones who are not gaming the system, receive immense advantages in the admissions process, thus giving white applicants yet another metric by which they are the most likely to receive preferential treatment. Even Harvard explained as part of its defense that athletes had an advantage in admissions over nonathletes, which conferred a much greater advantage to white students over Asian American students than any supposed disadvantage that affirmative action might create. And white students benefit from their relatives being more likely to have the wealth to make major donations to highly selective institutions. And white students benefit from their parents being overrepresented on the faculty and staff at colleges and universities. Relatives of donors and children of college employees normally receive an admissions boost.

How funny that the metrics that don’t consider academic aptitude end up being racially exclusive. It’s almost like that’s why the standardized test was so effective at eliminating racial barriers to entry for education – and I’ve gone ahead and repeated myself from earlier. The authors’ complete inability to self-reflect is making their arguments repetitive, so my rebuttals naturally become repetitive as well.

Putting this all together, one study found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, the children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (as relatives of donors)—compared with only 16 percent of Black, Latino, and Asian American students. About 75 percent of white admitted students “would have been rejected” if they hadn’t been in those four categories, the study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found.

No shit.

While private and public universities tout “diversity” recruitment efforts, their standard recruitment strategies concentrate on high-income students who are predominantly white and Asian, at highly resourced schools, positioned to have higher grade point averages and test scores that raise college rankings. Public colleges and universities facing declines in state and federal funding actively recruit white and wealthy out-of-state students who pay higher fees. At many institutions, including a UC campus, “admission by exception,” a practice originally promoted as a means of expanding opportunities for disadvantaged groups, has been used to enroll international students with the resources to pay U.S. tuition fees.

We wouldn't want that “not-for-profit” margin to suffer, after all.

Targeting international students of color to achieve greater diversity on campus disadvantages American students of color. Targeting students from families who can pay exorbitant out-of-state fees benefits white families, who have, on average, 10 times the household net worth of Black families.

Previously acknowledged in this post.

Affirmative action attempted to compensate not just for these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students, but also for the legacy of racism in society. This legacy is so deep and wide that affirmative action has rightly been criticized as a superficial, Band-Aid solution. Still, it has been the only admissions policy that pushes against the deep advantages that white Americans receive in the other admissions metrics under the cover of “race neutral.”

For all the reasons previously outlined in this post, the response to this paragraph is: nope.

If anti-affirmative-action litigants and judges were really supportive of “race neutrality”—if they were really against “racial preferences”—then they would be going after regular admissions practices. But they are not, because the regular admissions metrics benefit white and wealthy students.

They are, in fact, going after the regular admissions practices.

“Why are we rewarding children for privileges and advantages accrued by prior generations?” said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group's executive director. “Your family's last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process.”

A good rule of thumb when making claims following the format “if they were ackthually against X, they'd be doing Y also” is to make sure they're not doing Y also. It is unlikely that the suckers who pick up what the authors put down will connect the dots between this paragraph and the headlines in mainstream outlets describing Espinoza-Madrigal's lawsuit.

Litigants and judges continue to use Asian Americans as political footballs to maintain these racial preferences for white and wealthy students. Particularly in the Harvard case, SFFA’s Edward Blum used Asian plaintiffs to argue that affirmative action harms Asian American applicants. No evidence of such racist discrimination was found in the lower courts.

It was. Reference previously provided. Argument previously rebutted.

According to an amicus brief filed by 1,241 social scientists, the so-called race-neutral admissions policy SFFA advocated for (which was just adopted by the highest Court) would actually harm Asian American applicants. It denies Asian American students the ability to express their full self in their applications, including experiences with racism, which can contextualize their academic achievements or struggles and counter racist ideas. This is especially the case with Hmong and Cambodian Americans, who have rates of poverty similar to or higher than those of Black Americans. Pacific Islander Americans have a higher rate of poverty than the average American.

To summarize this paragraph: “Actually, if Asians just played along better in this racist system we designed to keep them out, they’d do way better! Never mind the fact that their experiences don’t matter to us when we can ascribe a metric of 'personality' to them that summarily ends their chances of admission!”

Pitting Asian and Black Americans against each other is an age-old tactic. Martha Lum’s parents didn’t want to send their daughter to a “colored” school, because they knew that more resources could be found in the segregated white schools. Jim Crow in the Mississippi Delta a century ago motivated the Lums to reinforce anti-Black racism—just as some wealthy Asian American families bought into Blum’s argument for “race neutral” admissions to protect their own status. Yet “separate but equal” closed the school door on the Lums. “Race neutral” is doing the same. Which is why 38 Asian American organizations jointly filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action at Harvard and UNC.

Protect what status? The discriminated one?

We also know that those 38 amici briefs are definitely representative of the Asian populations the authoring organizations represent, because that’s what all of the major polls show. Oh wait, they show the opposite? Whoops.

A century ago, around the time the Court stated that equal facilities for education were being afforded to both races, Mississippi spent $57.95 per white student compared with $8.86 per Black student in its segregated schools. This racial inequity in funding existed in states across the South: Alabama ($47.28 and $13.32), Florida ($61.29 and $18.58), Georgia ($42.12 and $9.95), North Carolina ($50.26 and $22.34), and South Carolina ($68.76 and $11.27). “Separate but equal” was a legal fantasy, meant to uphold racist efforts to maintain these racial inequities and strike down anti-racist efforts to close them.

The racist Supreme Court that created the racist “separate but equal” doctrine also lied about something to uphold racism? :surprisedpikachuface:

The last sentence in this paragraph is exactly correct and a good summary of the doctrine.

Homer Plessy had sued for being kicked off the “whites only” train car in New Orleans in 1892. About four years later, the Court deployed the “separate but equal” doctrine to work around the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause to defend the clearly unequal train cars and the exclusion of Black Americans like Plessy from better-equipped “whites only” cars. Later, the Court used the same doctrine to exclude Asian Americans like Martha Lum from better-equipped “whites only” schools.

The “separate but equal” doctrine was the Court’s stamp to defend the structure of racism. Just as Plessy v. Ferguson’s influence reached far beyond the railway industry more than a century ago, the fantasy of “race neutral” alternatives to affirmative action defends racism well beyond higher education. Evoking “race neutrality,” Justice Clarence Thomas recently dissented from the Supreme Court decision upholding a provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibits racist gerrymandering.

Just because Clarence Thomas makes shitty arguments that Constitutional anti-racism precludes the enforcement of anti-racism in law doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. But cherry-picking the proponents of an idea which has nothing to do with the one at hand, but shares a similar name, is a very effective tactic at silencing legitimate decent. It’s not a strawman; it’s an entire goddamn field.

It is nice to see the authors mention the 14th Amendment as an anti-racist work of law. Although it’s unclear if they actually meant to do so. I half-expected them to declare that law racist, too. After all, it further enshrines race-neutrality in the Constitution.

Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature. It was nearly a century ago that civil-rights activists in the NAACP and other organizations were gearing up for a legal movement to expose the fantasy of “separate but equal.” In this new legal movement, defenders of affirmative action can no longer use the false framing of affirmative action as “race conscious” and the regular admissions metrics as “race neutral”—a framing that has been used at least since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978, which limited the use of affirmative action. Racist and anti-racist is a more accurate framing than “race neutral” and “race conscious.”

Affirmative-action policies are anti-racist because they have been proved to reduce racial inequities, while many of the regular admissions metrics are racist because they maintain racial inequities. To frame policies as “race neutral” or “not racist” or “race blind” because they don’t have racial language—or because the policy makers deny a racist intent—is akin to framing Jim Crow’s grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests as “race neutral” and “not racist,” even as these policies systematically disenfranchised southern Black voters. Then again, the Supreme Court allowed these Jim Crow policies for decades on the basis that they were, to use today’s term, “race neutral.” Voter-suppression policies today that target Black, Latino, and Indigenous voters have been allowed by a Supreme Court that deems them “race neutral.” Jim Crow lives in the guise of “racial neutrality.”

For literally all of the reasons previously discussed here, affirmative-action did not reduce racial inequities, it redistributed them. Many of the regular metrics are indeed racist for the reason the authors give. The racial elements of the Jim Crow laws were openly discussed at the time and black populations were studied in order to understand what laws would most effectively target them; race is stamped on those laws even if the language was removed from the final revision. Unlike the race-neutrality of the Constitution, which espoused radical ideas of human freedom (both in the context of its discussion and in the words of the document itself) that even the Framers were not radical enough to entirely embrace, the Jim Crow laws were always meant to be racist. So it is rather odd to call them “race-neutral.”

I also notice that nobody who writes about the Jim Crow laws notes that they were illegal (according to the Constitution, that evil thing!) even without the racist elements because they prevented citizens from voting. Even a similar law which had been designed to be equitable in denying voting rights to both white and black citizens would have been illegal.

Jim Crow indeed lived in the guise of “racial neutrality” not because it provided a veneer of acceptability but because it provided plausible deniability. If Jim Crow had actually been race-neutral instead of covering itself in that appearance, it wouldn’t have been Jim Crow because it would have been race-neutral, protective of all equally under the law.

Everyone should know that the regular admission metrics are the racial problem, not affirmative action. Everyone knew that racial separation in New Orleans and later Rosedale, Mississippi, was not merely separation; it was segregation. And segregation, by definition, cannot be equal. Segregationist policies are racist policies. Racial inequities proved that then.

Separation was inherently unequal. Racial inequities weren’t an ex post facto justification for getting rid of segregation. Segregation wasn't OK until it led to the unequal nature of facilities. Segregation was always unequal, and you didn’t need racial inequities to prove that. It was self-evident.

The Court stated in today’s ruling, “By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal.” But it still does not want to acknowledge another inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment that has emerged today: Race cannot be neutral.

Race cannot be neutral in much the same way that bottles cannot be neutral and the sky cannot be neutral: none of these things are moral things and so cannot have a moral term ascribed to them. The word “neutral” doesn’t make sense in any of those clauses because it implies a different word – “good”, or perhaps “bad” – could be substituted to describe the concept. There are some skies which are described negatively (“bad weather”) but nobody says that weather as a concept is overall negative, because they'd be asserting that the world would be better off without weather. Maybe we would be better off without weather, but the question is relevant because it's not going anywhere. Neither is race.

Today, racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be “race neutral” are hardly neutral. Race, by definition, has never been neutral. In a multiracial United States with widespread racial inequities in wealth, health, and higher education, policies are not “race neutral.” Policies either expand or close existing racial inequities in college admissions and employment. The “race neutral” doctrine is upholding racist efforts to maintain racial inequities and striking down anti-racist efforts to close racial inequities.

Again: the sky, by definition, has never been neutral. This r/im14andthisisdeep nonsense gets old after the first time.

The authors attempt sleight of hand: they write, in different words, “policies are not anti-racist. They either expand or close existing racial inequities… the ‘anti-racist’ doctrine upholds racism.” Race-neutrality is anti-racism. Racism, regardless of the Orwellian misuse of the term “anti-racism” to describe racist practices, is still just racism.

Race, by definition, has never been blind. Even Justice John Harlan, who proclaimed, “Our Constitution is color-blind” in his dissent of Plessy v. Ferguson, prefaced that with this declaration: “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country” and “it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.”

Regardless of what Harlan actually meant when he wrote that sentence, it cannot even come close to competing with the fact that Harlan’s color-blind Constitution was and is an airtight argument denouncing state racism. Justice Thurgood Marshall recognized this; he considered Justice Harlan's dissent “his 'bible'.” Many similar comments by anti-racists have been claimed by people in the authors’ sphere of influence as evidence against anti-racism: a notable example is that Abe Lincoln favored returning all freed slaves to Africa because he thought white America would never be able to make up for the sin of slavery. Some cite this as a mark to discredit Abe Lincoln’s anti-racism despite being quite possibly the single most effective anti-racist in American history (he literally ended slavery!). A similar tactic is used to discredit Justice Harlan despite the fact that if his opinion had prevailed it would have ended segregation around 50 years early. In both cases these anti-racists are slandered for the same reason: they would have disagreed with the authors’ vision for America, and that is evident from their written words and their actions.

In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.

I request the authors conduct a survey of those who advocate color blindness to determine if they actually think this way.

Oh wait, the survey has already been conducted. It’s the same survey they conducted asking Americans about affirmative action. We must have a real racial supremacy problem if the “color-blind” (majorities of every racial group) “often” see themselves as superior.

“Separate but equal” then. “Race neutral” now.

We got it the first time, guys. Cool the jets. I’m not gonna believe it just because you said it 3 times. There’s only so much Orwellian idea hammering you can channel in one essay before the normal people start to get uncomfortable. You have to make it just a bit more difficult to make comparisons between your rhetoric and 1984.