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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35508 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.

The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.

The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

the decision leaves open the ability for universities to consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university".

universities [can still] consider how an applicant's race affected their life "concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university"

Quality of character: The resilience borne of having grown up in the oppressive anti-Black racial landscape of the United States

Unique ability: The ability to navigate hostile white environments as a Black person in a racialized body.

Don’t think for one second the judges didn’t know what they were doing. They’re not morons, they managed to allow states to ban abortion with minimal loopholes. This ruling is deliberately designed to allow everything to continue.

The problem is that Roberts is practically a progressive on this issue, while Coney-Barrett has personal circumstances that obviously make hardline opposition to affirmative action less likely. Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Kavanaugh are only four alone, even if they had wanted to say something else.

Edit:

In a footnote to the majority opinion in the case, Roberts indicated that the decision does not apply to the United States military academies.

So the military even received an explicit carve-out. Wow.

What is ACB personal circumstances? Only thing I can think of is Notre Dame’s 85% Catholic quota. But I assume you can get around that since it’s not a race but a choice to be Catholic and anyone is allowed to be Catholic.

Barrett has several adopted children, IIRC two of which are from Haiti and would presumably benefit from affirmative action.

They're SCOTUS justice kids, they don't need AA. IF anything the optimal move if she wanted her kids to prosper would be banning uni AA while preserving it in corporations, so that they end up some of the only Black ivy grads coming out.

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