okay i'm dan hagerty and this is the part of the newscast where i invite you to join the
conversation what do you think about the local news what are we talking about are we glossing
over important topics please let me know email me at dan wral.com it's right at the bottom of
your screen now tonight let's start a discussion into affirmative action or race-based admission
decisions from our colleges and universities because it could go away after a lawsuit filed
against the university of north carolina here's the latest headline supreme court to consider
landmark challenge to harvard and unc affirmative action policies now the plaintiffs here are
arguing that those schools are using quotas to cap the number of asian american students that
they accept in order to reserve spots for other minority groups like black students now the key
word to take away there is quotas which are a no-no this can all be a little bit confusing so
let me try to explain from the beginning the term affirmative action was first used in the 1960s by
jfk to discuss problems with discrimination in the workforce the idea was kind of vague at the
time but the goal was simple basically called on institutions to hire more black people after
decades of direct action to block blacks from certain jobs access to housing education things
like that then paired with the civil rights movement that idea started to take shape and by
the 1970s major colleges and universities across the country had adopted some form of affirmative
action mostly by setting aside spots that were exclusively reserved for minority applicants
and that's when alan becky came along you see in the mid-1970s becky a white man
got rejected by the university of california twice despite having higher test scores than some of
the black students who were accepted who filled spots reserved exclusively from minorities now
baccy sued over this and the supreme court agreed with him look at the headline from the la
times at the time backy wins but justices uphold affirmative action see they decided two things
in this case one the racial quotas were unconstitutional you can't have special spots
for a specific race and two that diversity is important for a thriving society and race
can't be ignored when striving for diversity justice harry blackmon wrote this at the time
in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race there is no other way so schools
stopped designating special spots for non-whites and started using race simply as a factor now look
schools consider lots of factors when you apply other than your test scores maybe you're the
class president or first chair in the school orchestra maybe you write for the school paper
or play on the softball team or you volunteer at a local animal shelter on the weekends
all that stuff helps and with affirmative action your race is also considered a factor
in the name of diversity which unfortunately in this case is a word that's very difficult to
define universally i mean how do you know if your school is diverse or diverse enough and if you
decide it is diverse enough and use the race of new applicants to continue that level of diversity
wouldn't that be a form of a quota it's a gray area that's led to a lot of disagreements and many
challenges to affirmative action over the past 40 years including the most recent one we're seeing
involve unc now so far the supreme court has ruled in every case that race still deserves to be a
part of the process i know this is a touchy topic for a lot of people it's easy to get emotionally
charged i watched some local news coverage about this recently and i heard an anchor ask a reporter
so do the plaintiffs think affirmative action is actually bad and that kind of kind of rubbed
me the wrong way because affirmative action isn't intrinsically good or bad it's a tool
i mean we know that race matters in society how and to what degree is constantly changing and
being debated just like the tools we use to deal with racism in this country let me put it this way
in 2003 the supreme court they upheld affirmative action in the case grutter versus bollinger here's
some c-span video from the time it was a case involving a white woman who didn't get accepted
into michigan law school now in a majority decision justice sandra day o'connor held that
while the use of race was acceptable in this case she said quote race conscious admissions policies
must be limited in time and that the quote court expects that 25 years from now the use of racial
preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest to prove today now before you say of
course you said that dan she was a republican well progressive justice ruth bader ginsburg also sat
on that court and concurred with the judgment though she did disagree with that specific
25-year timeline but justice ginsburg wrote that race conscious programs quote must have a logical
end point now some people believe with the conservative makeup of the current court that end
point may be sometime next year so i guess we have between now and then to discuss if it's logical
again this is a discussion i know there's a lot more to discuss they only give me a few minutes up
here so if there's something you think i haven't said something i miss something you think i should
consider please email me at dan at wral.com and feel free to ask complicated questions i know how
to get in touch with the experts and the right people to help you get answers dan at wral.com