No one particularly likes affirmative action. why should we? It is an imperfect remedy designed to mend an embarrassing history

ongoing

history of racism and exclusion. It requires people to be judged, and in some cases denied opportunities, based on their skin color.

It is based on the premise that society cannot always be colorblind, which goes against everything we have been taught to believe and would like to believe about ourselves.

That’s one reason why so many people prefer it

affirmative action as just a temporary fix that will one day no longer be needed. President Clinton said in 1995: Affirmative action cannot go on forever. It should be withdrawn when the work is done.

That argument

that affirmative action is constitutional but must be “limited in time”.

was made most famous by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the Grutter v. Bollinger. The court expects that the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary in 25 years…,

”

she wrote for the majority.

that was in it

2003. As O’Connor’s supposed deadline approaches, the Supreme Court is about to rule on two explosive affirmative action cases,

An

involving Harvard University and the other, the University of North Carolina. Many experts believe that the

C

The current right-wing court is about to overturn decades of precedent by banning the consideration of race as a factor in college and university admissions.

A decision declaring affirmative action unconstitutional would apparently be okay with most Americans. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found that 62% do not believe race or ethnicity should be taken into consideration when entering university.

But they are wrong. Affirmative action is both morally justified and much needed. prohibit

it would be a huge mistake.

And to be clear, O’Connor’s 25-year time frame, which was cited repeatedly by the court’s conservative judges during oral arguments, was never really a deadline. It was a prediction at best or maybe just an expression of hope that turned out to be overly optimistic. Fourteen years later, O’Connor told her biographer, Evan Thomas, “That may have been a misjudgment.

When asked how long affirmative action would be needed, she told another interviewer, “There is no time frame. You just don’t know.

I don’t know either, but I do know that today the injustices of American racism are still being undone, and affirmative action remains a critical tool in the process. While the Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action is only legally justified by its role in promoting “diverse” student organizations, I believe its main benefit is that it is a remedy for the harmful effects of past discrimination.

College, the great gateway to the middle class, was restricted to white students for most of American history. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, during the Kennedy administration, that college campus integration began in earnest and taking affirmative action to undo racism became part of the lexicon.

However, despite significant gains, students of color today remain unreasonably disadvantaged. A 2022 McKinsey study, among others, found that black and Latino people, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders are still underrepresented among students, teachers and administrators.

At the current rate of change, McKinsey concluded, it would take 70 years for all nonprofit colleges and universities to fully reflect underrepresented students in their incoming student population.

Today, white college applicants are still more likely than non-whites to have attended higher-performing, better-funded schools. Their families are more likely to benefit from wealth accumulation. They are more likely to qualify for legacy preferences.

According to the nonprofit EdBuild in 2019, predominantly white local school districts in the U.S. collectively receive $23 billion more per year than non-white districts.

African Americans are more likely to live in disadvantaged neighborhoods and attend underfunded high schools. Former president of Columbia University Lee Bollinger and

University of Chicago

Law professor Geoffrey Stone has written that predominantly non-white school districts are less likely to provide access to college-level math and science courses. It is not surprising that black students still follow white students in general educational attainment.

The Economic Policy Institute notes that black Americans are just over half as likely as white Americans to have a college education. Yet university degrees are the main drivers of social mobility, helping those in need to find their way out of poverty.

Campus diversity, meanwhile, benefits everyone, including white students. Studies show that diversity helps combat racial prejudice and prejudice. It helps wash away stereotypes.

Certainly, positive action must be temporary. I look forward to that glorious and hopefully unmythical day when the United States will no longer struggle with the after-effects of slavery, segregation and bigotry and the ongoing consequences of institutionalized discrimination.

But it would be foolish to set a deadline for that.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court will do what it wants to do. Banning affirmative action completely could lead to a sudden drop in non-white admissions.

California banned affirmative action admissions to the University of California and other state institutions when it passed Proposition 209 in 1996, and the number of non-white students promptly plummeted. Despite more than 25 years of outreach programs for low-income students, and

Despite

Redesigned race-neutral admissions policy, UC continues to struggle “to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to reap the educational benefits of diversity,” UC President Michael Drake and all 10 campus chancellors wrote in an amicus brief in the current case.

Are

possibly the court could take a less radical approach, with a narrow

to govern

be bound to

more

closely

Harvard and UNC, instead of banning one

the consideration of race in admissions to schools across the country.

The judges can nod

race-neutral approaches to diversifying colleges and universities, such as giving applicants admission preference based on socioeconomic status, or eliminating inheritance and donor admission preferences. Some of these are valuable, promising ideas; others would be less effective.

Over the years, the court has responded favorably to such racially neutral approaches, but a New York Times article earlier this week suggested that even those may now be offensive to the courts’ more conservative judges.

Overall, however, the outlook for positive action is pretty bleak. It would be a tragedy for a country as troubled as ours, still struggling to move beyond our own ugly racial history, to take a giant step backwards instead of forward.

@nick_goldberg