Speaker 1: TV's Dan Mangan, who really sums this up.
The Supreme Court ruled that the affirmative action admission policies of Harvard and the
University of North Carolina, which gave weight to a would be students race, are unconstitutional.
The ruling is a massive blow to decades old efforts to boost enrollment of racial minorities
at American universities.
The court's majority opinion said the school's affirmative action programs, quote, unavoidably
employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping and lack meaningful end
points.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, quote, Today This court stands in the way
and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.
There are those on the right who were never in favor of such a policy.
There are those on the right and left who were at one point in favor of such a policy
but believe it is no longer necessary.
And there are those mostly on the left who continue to believe that such race based affirmative
action policies are still necessary based on current circumstances.
You know, as I think about this.
I don't believe that this is the right decision right now today.
But I do believe that the right direction for such policies would eventually be an off
ramp.
Now, the off ramp should be at a time when we can point and say, here is the panorama.
Here is the situation in which we can now say affirmative action should be class based.
It should potentially be geography based in some ways which relates to class, etc..
But maybe enough has been done where the race based component need not be a part anymore.
And I want to be really clear.
I don't think we are quite there yet.
But the time was coming.
Colleges knew that it was coming.
Activists on the left that we've interviewed have in many cases felt that this is a matter
of when, not if.
And I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to figure out where do we go next
in ensuring equitable access to higher education.
Because I do believe it was an inevitability that this was coming.
And that is not a defense of this Supreme Court making this decision right now.
Clarence Thomas wrote Two discriminatory wrongs cannot make a right, saying that, yes, there
were at one point racist admission policies, but that then now using this kind of race
based affirmative action is just an additional wrong.
You're not writing a wrong with another wrong.
That's a right wing view for sure.
Sonia Sotomayor calling the ruling profoundly wrong and devastating and saying that the
majority holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions.
I do think, despite what I just told you about the fact that this was inevitable at some
point and it was more a matter of when, not if.
I do think it's important that we not even for a second fall for.
The claims that are often made by right wingers about how this work, and this is often the
case when, for example, Joe Biden said, I think I would like to put a black woman on
the Supreme Court and all of these right wingers go, Why would you put an unqualified person
on the court merely because she's a black woman?
Of course, speaking about Judge Jackson and we all who understood what was going on rightly
said, it's not that you're going to put an unqualified person.
You're not lowering the standard.
You're simply saying we have so many qualified people in the United States, white men, black
women, etc., that what Joe Biden is saying is, I am going to choose from the well qualified
black women because we have an extraordinarily notable lack of that sort of representation
on the Supreme Court.
And similarly, it is not that colleges have been going around finding, quote, unworthy
or unqualified minorities to admit.
It's that when you have equally qualified candidates, some colleges have opted in the
direction of considering race and historical inequality in making their decisions.
You can be for or against it, but let's be honest about what it was.
However, it's 2023.
This is the decision that the Supreme Court has made.
Colleges have long been preparing for years.
We've talked about it on the bonus show.
Speaker 2: David Pac-Man membership because six bucks a month.
Yeah.
Speaker 1: We've talked about it on the bonus show, how colleges have been preparing for
what this will look like.
This was a matter of time.
This was only a matter of time.
And while I don't know that now was the exact right time, this is going to be the reality.
And we will see how colleges deal with it and we will see if there are unforeseen repercussions
as
a result.