E-Pluribus | February 22, 2024

SCOTUS punts on college admissions; pushing back on neoracism; and DEI's low expectations.

Feb 22, 2024

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Renu Mukherjee: Supreme Injustice

At times it appears the Supreme Court is reluctant to go where its previous rulings ought to lead. At City Journal, Renu Mukherjee provides a recent example involving admissions policies that try to avoid direct racial quotas while accomplishing the same goal. By refusing to hear this case, the court encourages similar behavior that will place additional barriers in front of deserving college applicants.

The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.
[. . .]
[T]he school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.
TJ’s new admissions policy achieved its intended effect: Asian American enrollment fell dramatically. The Class of 2025 (the first admitted under the new system) is 54.36 percent Asian, 22.36 percent white, 11.27 percent Latino, and 7.9 percent black. Asian Americans, in other words, were the only racial or ethnic group to lose seats at TJ after the policy change, seeing their enrollment decline by almost 20 percentage points.
The results of the new policy prompted a group of parents, students, and alumni—many of them Asian immigrants or the children of Asian immigrants—to sue the Fairfax County School Board. The group, Coalition for TJ, alleged that the magnet school’s change in admissions policy was motivated by racial discrimination violative of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
[. . .]
The Court’s reluctance to enforce its ruling is a shame for those who believe in America’s promise of equal protection. It also means that Students for Fair Admissions, at least for now, is toothless. As Alito noted in his dissent from the Court’s denial of certiorari, other selective public high schools, along with some colleges and universities, have cited TJ’s new admissions policy as an example of how racial proxies can be used to evade the Court’s affirmative-action ruling. As such policies proliferate, Asian American students will continue to be harmed.
Still, all hope is not lost. In his dissent, Alito cited Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. School Committee for Boston, another case challenging a selective public high school admissions policy that is facially neutral but anti-Asian in effect. Pacific Legal Foundation, the public-interest law firm that represented Coalition for TJ, is representing a similar group called the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence. The law firm shared in a press release yesterday that it will soon ask the Court to take up that case.

Read it all here.

Andrew Sullivan: Neoracism, Finally on Defense

Discussing Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, Andrew Sullivan suggests the “neoracist” ideas that have developed since the Civil Rights movement are facing serious challenges. Sullivan finds encouragement in recent trends rejecting simplistic racial theories that exacerbate the problems.

Has the United States ever officially been a color-blind society? You could make a plausible case that it hasn’t. For four centuries, it enshrined enslavement and then segregation of African-Americans, pursued the near-extermination and ethnic cleansing of most Native Americans, and subsequently made “white” racial identity central to its immigration policies. Then, in the mid-1960s, in civil rights and immigration, it finally repudiated this racist regime. The philosophy behind the 1964 Civil Rights Act can be traced back to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips in 1867, who insisted that the end of slavery was not enough: “When once the nation is absolutely, irrevocably pledged to the principle that there shall be no recognition of race by the United States or by State law, then the work of the great anti-slavery movement which commenced in 1831, is accomplished.”
[. . .]
But almost as soon as the 1964 breakthrough in overcoming racial classifications took hold, it was abandoned. In a perverse echo of the past, sanctioned preferential treatment for blacks slowly began to replace sanctioned preferential treatment for whites. Set-asides, quotas, affirmative action all proliferated, all rooted in the old, crude racial classifications. The notion that affirmative action was a temporary adjustment, to be retired in a couple of decades at most, gradually disappeared. In fact, it was extended to every other racial or sexual minority and to women. Even as women and many blacks and other minorities triumphed in the economy and mainstream culture, they were nonetheless deemed eternal victims of pervasive misogyny and racism.
[. . .]
For the neoracists, all racial disparities are entirely explained by “systemic racism”. But this obviously obscures the complexity of American society. “Culture” is a loaded and complex term, but it sure matters. A child with two engaged parents in the home has far more chances to succeed than a kid who barely sees his dad. Now look at the difference between family structure among many Asian-American groups and that of black Americans. And how can one blame “white supremacy” for the constant murderous mayhem of urban black spaces? Only by removing from young black men any concept of their own agency and humanity.
[. . .]
There’s reason for optimism. Last year, Pew found that support for BLM had “dropped considerably from its peak in 2020,” and a majority believe that the “racial reckoning” since 2020 “hasn’t led to improvements for Black Americans.” Affirmative action in higher ed was struck down by SCOTUS, and 68 percent of Americans say that is “mostly a good thing.” Kendi’s “antiracism” center has imploded; the “1619 Project” docu-series was panned by audiences; Robin DiAngelo is roundly mocked; Claudine Gay has resigned; and DEI is waning in corporate America.

Read the whole thing.

Erec Smith: We Are Too Good for DEI

At Discourse Magazine, Erec Smith argues that current systems that single out black Americans for special help are misguided and actually harmful. Smith says the emphasis of Black History Month should be about empowerment and what can be achieved in the face of adversity, not about stories of victimhood.

The U.S. is currently celebrating Black History Month, and I’ve been asked to share my thoughts about how this month of celebration aligns with DEI initiatives. The answer to that question depends on the type of DEI. Some DEI initiatives align with the classical liberal values of the civil rights movement, and indeed of America’s founding, such as freedom and equal opportunity for all, regardless of skin color. Other versions of DEI, however, are undergirded by critical social justice (CSJ), an ideology that pits whites and Blacks against each other; whites are perpetual oppressors, and Blacks are perpetually oppressed. This variation of DEI, which I refer to as CSJ-DEI, is the ideology that was on display during the aforementioned listserv debacle. It insists on the perpetual victim status of Black Americans and, in so doing, is ideologically opposed to the celebration of Black Americans because it focuses on their trials, not their triumphs. Black History Month is supposed to be about Black empowerment, but CSJ-DEI depends on Black disempowerment.
[. . .]
CSJ-DEI is about leaning into to the “downtrodden Black person” narrative, but that narrative does not align with the reality of today’s America. Forget about the growing presence of current or recent Black immigrants and the enhanced socioeconomic status of many Black Americans today. According to the altered reality of CSJ-DEI, Black people must still be seen as irredeemably oppressed. Scholars Julian Adorney and Jake Mackey call this altered reality a “virtuous lie,” defined as “a false or dubious claim that is asserted without qualification because it is thought to advance an ethical agenda.” Exaggerated police statistics and the insistence that Black Americans are still caught in a form of slavery are just the tips of this “virtuous” iceberg.
Virtuous lies are anything but virtuous in these situations, but they show up in traditionally virtuous places, such as scholarly journals. In the scientific journal Cell, prominent scientists insist that the Black individuals among their ranks “continue to suffer institutional slavery.” In addition, a philosophy professor argues that the “years 1492 and 1619 and 1857 and 1955 are still now” and insists she means this in “a meaningful, non-metaphorical sense” (my emphasis). The absurdity of these statements is matched, if not eclipsed, only by the fact that these authors were confident their arguments would be taken seriously. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was emboldened enough to say that a false narrative is acceptable if it feels “morally right”; to insist on facts is to be misguided.
Black History Month is too good for CSJ-DEI. It is about the celebration of figures in Black history who beat seemingly insurmountable odds. It is about figures like educator Mary McLeod Bethune, lawyer Samuel J. Lee, congressman Josiah T. Walls and many others of whom most are unaware. I firmly believe that these figures would scoff at CSJ-inspired ideas such as equitable math, the demonization of debate and the violence of teaching Standard English to Black students.

Read it all.