 I've heard many people on the left sort of hyperventilating and about the consequences of this decision for black Americans and for racism. I mean, that's a very uninformed fear to push, I think. There's two things to say just right off the bat. One is nine states had already banned affirmative action before this ruling. And I did not recall anyone, you know, when I was applying to college in 2013 saying, hey Coleman, you know, you're a bright black and Hispanic kid. Just make sure you don't apply, don't bother applying to California or Washington or all of these other states, Michigan, because it's a hellscape there for black kids. No one said that because no one even had that fear. And now there are people trying to sort of uncover all the ways in which it's been terrible to be a black California student for the past 25 years as a way of sort of justifying that take. You have also pointed out in, you have a phenomenal article that you wrote at your sub-stack about this that is in our show notes and whatnot, but that we're also talking here about a very elite phenomenon. Can you discuss that a little bit and, you know, just what does that mean in the context of college admissions? Yeah, so I am a half black, half Hispanic elite. So when I make these comments, I come from a place of knowledge and love, not of denigration, but the policy we call affirmative action is not a policy that has anything to do with addressing the problems of what used to be called the black underclass, the problems of black poverty, the legacy of racism and so forth. It's a policy that affects, according to Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, about 1% of black and Hispanic 18 year olds in any given year, the other 99% either don't graduate high school to begin with or graduate high school, but go to colleges with higher acceptance rates that don't practice affirmative action. So this, some people want to frame this as a decision about quote unquote, access to higher education has nothing to do with access to higher education per se. It has to do with the ease of entrance to a very select set of Ivy League and elite schools in general, which have a somewhat inflated sense of self-importance to begin with. For instance, if you look, and again, I speak as someone who went to Columbia and so- And Juilliard as well. Yeah, which is a totally different case. But if you look at the colleges attended by the Fortune 500 CEOs in this country, you see very few elite colleges there. By and large, you see schools with like above 60% acceptance rates that wouldn't be affected by this ruling. And they all somehow got good educations there. So I think we have to keep in proportion what this case is really about. And can we, here is a slide that this is Joe Biden speaking, saying affirmative action is so misunderstood. I wanna be clear, make sure everybody is clear about what the law has been and what it's not been. Many people wrongly believe that affirmative action allows unqualified students to be admitted ahead of qualified students. This is not how college admissions work. And then just this is admin rates at Harvard by race and ethnicity and academic decil. And what this chart shows essentially is that the acceptance rate for an Asian-American in the top academic decil. So these are extremely high performing students at Harvard had a slightly lower rate than an African-American applicant in the fourth academic decil or the sixth in the Hispanic. So it's not a question of whether or not everybody is qualified or unqualified, but it does seem clear. And this certainly came out in the case against Harvard that they were diminishing the possibility of Asian-Americans to get in according to the way that they would have kind of test scores and the general profile was there without a racial preference. When you look at something like that Coleman, what's your response to that? You just said you're Hispanic and African-American. You obviously have been killing it, but when you look at that, what's your response to that? First of all, people have long defended affirmative action by saying it's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tiebreaker between otherwise identical candidates. I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it, but it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit uncomfortable defending the reality of it. They would wish it to be more of a thumb on the scale thing, but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for, I mean, several decades actually. Thomas Eschman-Said found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student. Everything else held equal. And just one more thing to say about that actually, sorry, I just forgot the point I was gonna make. Continue. Well, yeah, I can jump in. The way Biden put it was a bit of a word trick because he made it hinge on something to which there is no definition, qualified versus unqualified. You can't go and find data that is assorted by those categories in order to sidestep the question of whether better qualified applicants were being turned away in favor of not as well qualified applicants, which is what we can get statistics on and those decile numbers were a good example of many others. So Biden makes an assertion that can't be verified about an undefined concept because he'd rather not talk about all the things that we do know. I think Walter, you took that from my head because that's exactly precisely what I wanted to say. Colbin, what happened in places like California and Michigan? Was there a substantial and persistent decline in the number of blacks and Hispanics who were admitted to the UC system or the Cal State system, things like that. And if so, is that a problem? And just to add so that I give you more questions that you could possibly remember much less answer in a single bound. If that is, if it does result in lower acceptance rates or lower attendance rates among blacks and Hispanics, is it college where that kind of thing should be addressed? You know, that kind of disparity. So what happened in California is that, UC, as you know, is not a college, it's a whole set of colleges as Cal State system. Some of those colleges after affirmative action was banned, black and Hispanic attendance went down. At other of those colleges, it went up so that the overall change in attendance was nothing. Which is kind of great, right? And kind of exactly what you'd expect. And there's a paper called Did the Sky Fall? The Consequences of Prop 209, which found that the graduation rate among the post-affirmative action class was actually somewhat higher, presumably because people were better matched, their incoming credentials and preparedness were better matched with the schools they were attending. One of the side effects of affirmative action has been that you're effectively sending that those black and Hispanic kids to be at the bottom of those better schools, which for some of them, I think some of them will rise to the occasion and find out that they really can hold a candle to all their prepared peers, but some of them can't. At half of U.S. adults disapprove of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity. A third approve, it changes a little bit. Blacks are more likely to approve, but it's still under half of blacks say that should happen. Interestingly, people who are Democrats, identify as Democrats and lean Democrat, 54% of them approve of using race and ethnicity. On a certain level, is this the Supreme Court catching up to where the country seems to be going? Well, yeah, I mean, I think either every or almost every time affirmative action has been put to a state referendum, including in states liberalist California, it's lost. So it has long been a fairly unpopular policy, worth noting that before 2020, Pew and Gallup asked these questions in 2019. And back then, even a majority of black adults said that they disapprove of the use of race in college admissions. And perhaps the kind of culture of the past three years has changed that for black Americans. But nevertheless, people, what's really interesting here to me is that back in 2019, when you asked the question, do you support affirmative action? Lots of people would say yes. Majorities would say yes. But if you ask the same group of people, do you support the use of race in college admissions? They'd say no. So it's clear the framing of using that euphemism affirmative action, which if you didn't know what it meant already would never tell you what it meant. Lent the policy kind of an air of credibility that the actual substance did not. That was an excerpt from our recent live stream with Walter Olson of the Cato Institute and Coleman Hughes talking about recent court decisions dealing with affirmative action and whether or not website operators had to serve gay couples. If you wanna see another excerpt, go here. If you wanna see the full thing and you should go here.