 The worst thing about affirmative action is that it created a parents' time, it's who benefited from the program and now is in a position where he's going to deny many young African American talented individuals an opportunity. You just listened to NAACP President Derek Johnson react to the illegitimate Supreme Court's decision to effectively kill affirmative action today. Now I can't say that I'm surprised, but regardless, as Kimberly Crenshaw put it, this decision is a significant setback for civil rights in the United States and are a cornerstone of the conservative movement's coordinated effort to roll back access to opportunity for systemically marginalized Americans. And she's absolutely correct about that. And there's more comments and facts about affirmative action that we're going to get to, but first I want to talk about the actual decision because I do think that that's important. So Slate's Mark Joseph Stern explains, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, effectively outlawing overt considerations of race at civilian institutions of higher education, public and private. So that right there is the effect of the decision. However, it's a puzzling move, legally speaking, considering that two loopholes are still in place. The first is that military academies are exempt from this decision and the second is that someone can still talk about how race played a role in their life and affected their life in admissions essay, for example, but the college can only take into account that person's individual experience and not the broader role that race plays in daily life in broader society. So the question is, what will that look like in practice and how does it defer from before? Well, Stern continues, these qualifications make chief justices otherwise thunderous opinion rather puzzling. It will undoubtedly curtail university's use of race and building each incoming class out long check the box style racial identifications that make admissions officers work easier. And that sea change will absolutely damage schools efforts to aid underrepresented racial minorities who received none of the privileges that many white applicants take for granted. In that respect, the decision is a massive blow to racial justice, one with noxious consequences throughout society that we will feel for the rest of our lives. But in a direct response to the incandescent dissents by Sotomayor and Justice Kintaji Brown Jackson, Robert's opinion leaves some room for admissions officers to undertake what might be called a holistic review of each applicant, including their racial identity as it relates to their life experiences. A quote holistic review, however, was already required by the precedents that Roberts effectively overturned on Thursday. Thus, the decision substitutes one vague regime with an even more ambiguous one inviting, as Sotomayor noted, a plethora of litigation that will promote chaos rather than establishing a workable new order. So in other words, Roberts knows that there's a problem, but his solution idiotically is to ignore societal and systemic ways that race plays a role in people's lives. And this is because, as Stern explained in the article, he believes that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is meant to be colorblind, meaning that the government simply can't classify people on the basis of race, which in theory should lead to equality since laws can't explicitly discriminate. The problem with the colorblind interpretation of the 14th Amendment is that the world just doesn't work that way. You can't abolish explicitly racist laws that we've had on the books for generations and just all of a sudden expect everyone to be equal. That's not how that works. Furthermore, even if laws are written in a colorblind way, they still can produce racist results. For example, Stop and Frisk didn't mandate that New York City police officers disproportionately stop blacks and Latinos more than white people, but that's the result of the law. But the question is why? Well, because of systemic factors, right? Because their cities are overpoliced. But why? Because police suspect that they're more likely to be guilty of crime than their white counterparts. But why? Because they live in more poor communities. But why? Because they've been denied access to wealth and capital. The point is that none of this is coincidental. And these colorblind laws mandate that you pretend like everything is copacetic so long as the state doesn't explicitly say you can target blacks for this, whites for that, and so on and so forth. So to remove racism in every single cultural and political institution, you can't pretend as if race isn't a problem if you abolish racist laws. You have to attack it head on and systematically dismantle white supremacy. Not pretend like it doesn't exist. And Ibram X. Kendi put it best in an article he co-wrote for The Atlantic with Uma Jayakumar. He writes, race neutral is a legal fantasy, the latest to conserve racism. He adds, quote, the idea of race neutral admissions metrics like test scores is a fantasy like the court doctrine that segregated schools were separate but equal. We show how several admissions metrics disadvantage black, Latinx, native, and many Asian students. The court effectively outlawed affirmative action, which closes racial inequities and admissions, leaving the metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. The result, a normality of racial inequities sanctioned by the court. Again. And I'll link to that article down below. We're not going to get into it, but I would recommend that you read it because what he says is very important. But what I do want to share with you is Justice Kintanji Brown Jackson's dissent because she also points that out in a really powerful way. Per Common Dreams, quote, in her dissent in the North Carolina case, Jackson wrote, Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations. She continues, every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles, the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal, she continued. With let them eat cake obliviousness today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces color blindness for all by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. Bingo. That is the core issue with this decision. And as a result, racial exclusion will now be the outcome. Now, part of the problem is that a lot of people don't actually know what affirmative action looks like in practice. They think that they know what it is, but in actuality, they don't really know what it entails. So the right conjures this image up in your mind of a young white dude who worked extremely hard to get a 4.0 GPA only to be passed over by a student with a 2.5 GPA because he was black. But that's not how that works. Affirmative action simply lets colleges use race as one of many factors in college admissions. So they're not just looking at race, right? It's not, oh, you didn't work very hard, but you're black will accept you. They're looking at a number of things. GPA, SAT scores, extracurricular activity, volunteer work. And also if this person was part of a historically disenfranchised community and they can use that as another plus, which is a good thing. People of color still have to work twice as hard to get half as far, but affirmative action made it so that way for the first time ever. Race wasn't seen as a negative. It was seen as a positive. But people like Tim Poole are spending the day calling people who support affirmative action racists simply because he's only capable of imagining this as reverse racism against white people when in actuality it's a meager attempt to right a historic wrong. But with this perception of affirmative action in mind, ironically, can you guess who actually benefits the most from affirmative action? Believe it or not, it's not black people. It's not Latinos. It's white people, literally. In a 2022 Teen Vogue article by Wendy Leo Moore, she addresses misconceptions about affirmative action and how it hasn't actually been that effective in addressing the racial equality gap within colleges, but it may have actually helped to close the gap when it comes to gender inequality and education and employment, with white women being the biggest beneficiaries of this policy. And furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the biggest determinant in college admissions isn't actually race, despite the existence of affirmative action. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, quote, if SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous colorblindness claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged. 70% of Harvard's legacy applicants are white. SCOTUS didn't touch that, which would have impacted them and their patrons. And she answered the question right there because you were all thinking as you were reading that, well, why wouldn't they touch this if they truly care about equality and colorblindness? It's because it affects them and their patrons. Now, right-wingers pretend like affirmative action results in, oh, well, you're black. We'll jump right to the front of the line. But in actuality, if you look at college admissions, what's happening is, oh, you're rich and your father and your grandfather went to this college, too? Well, jump right to the front of the line. That's the actual reality if you really want to reduce it down to a caricature, right? But nobody really looks at legacy admissions despite the inherent unfairness with that practice, right? They're not saying, oh, well, legacy admissions is leading to underserving mediocre applicants. Meanwhile, black and brown students get side-eyed when they're in college by the whites who feel like they're not qualified to be in that same space with them. And David Dole shared a portion of Ellie Mistal's response to this decision that I want to share because he speaks to this. He writes, Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I've had white folks whom I could standardize test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy whose parents' name was on one of the buildings on campus who asked me how it felt to know that I got extra help to get in. Unbelievable. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping. He adds affirmative action is used by a certain kind of unwashed white mediocrity as an excuse to denigrate the credentials of anybody black. And that is so true. He is spot-on right there. In fact, there was a famous case involving a woman named Abigail Fisher. And after getting rejected from the University of Austin, she decided to blame black people as opposed to her own mediocrity. Or more specifically, she claimed that her whiteness was the result of her rejection specifically when she had absolutely no evidence that that was indeed the case. But when all else fails, blame affirmative action. That's the go-to strategy for people who can't accept that they didn't get in because of black people being able to get in. Inclusion isn't the issue. They're the issue. Other issues may be the issue, right? But that's what Ellie Mustal was talking about here. In fact, Justice Kintanji Brown Jackson herself experienced this after Biden announced that he wanted a black woman on the Supreme Court. People argued that this was racist because he was prioritizing race over qualifications, yet she's by far and away the most experienced and qualified justice on the Supreme Court by every single metric that matters. So again, affirmative action does not increase mediocrity. You can blame legacy admissions for that. But it really doesn't matter now because it was effectively destroyed by the Supreme Court. And one last thing that I want to leave you with is a tweet from Hasan Piker who asks, how are you supposed to mend racial wounds if even the band-aid solutions are now considered racist? And that, my friends, is a very good question. I mean, when doing the bare fucking minimum is considered reverse racism against white people, how are we actually supposed to fix these problems at all? I mean, pretending like it doesn't exist hasn't helped, but the conservatives opposed to affirmative action haven't actually proposed any counter solutions. And that's because maintaining white supremacy and that status quo benefits them personally. And they will do everything in their power to keep that current power structure in place. So that's why they simply don't want to address the problem because inclusion of others feels like oppression to them.