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Notes -
affirmative action is officially unconstitutional.
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".
My question now is will this extend to DEI hiring/promoting practices in corporate America. I’m at a mega corp and we practice what certainly looks like racial/gender discrimination (for example leadership teams and # of managers have to comply with HR DEI %’s). I’m honestly not sure how we get away with it when racial/gender discrimination in the workforce is already illegal in the US, but either way would love for this ruling to push companies to reevaluate these policies or even better for another case to make it to SCOTUS around corp DEI policies.
When the President of the United States can hire a public employee to the highest court in the land with a brazen declaration that Progressive Racism will be followed to the exclusion of the majority of qualified candidates, it’s probably quixotic to imagine change in your local workplace. Consider Biden the alt-Woodrow Wilson and yourself the alt-target of Wilsonian federalized bigotry. Going by the original timeline, we’re 50 years off from civil rights.
The President has much more free hand there than a rank-and-file bureaucrat. It'd be very hard to sue the President for not nominating me to Supreme Court because I am a white male. It's a very exclusive unique position, and it'd be almost impossible to argue - even if I were an accomplished law scholar, which of course I'm not - that I deserve that particular position, and while the racism here is indeed brazen, formulating a legal policy that would prevent it while not unduly constraining the President's choices would be very non-trivial. On the other hand, university admission or hiring practices or any other governmental action applied en masse is easier to regulate, since it requires some rules, procedures, official criteria, etc. It won't be sustainable if Harvard president had to personally decide on each case. There would be institutional procedures. That's where you can look for discriminatory policies. Of course, it's possible to hide them, and I am sure Harvard will try their best to do just that, but at least they couldn't do it in the open anymore. It's not the victory over racism, but it's a step in denormalizing it, with is a necessary precondition to victory.
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