The Court has considered affirmative action in university admissions six times. Since then, it has had a much harder time making up its mind in cases involving race. In 1954, the Court joined the civil-rights revolution in a unanimous decision declaring legally segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has been ruling on these policies for half a century. This conclusion is remarkable-and remarkably wrong.”Īffirmative action is one of many policies-not just in admissions but also in employment, contracting, education, and voting-that take race into account, as a way of reversing the effects of many more policies, lasting for many more years, that openly discriminated against Black people. has never provided any coherent explanation for its asserted need to discriminate on the basis of race, and even though U.T.’s position relies on a series of unsupported and noxious racial assumptions, the majority concludes that U.T. Students who weren’t Black used the laws banning racial discrimination to claim that universities were now discriminating in favor of Black people, and against them.Īlito concluded his dissent with an impassioned statement: “What is at stake is whether university administrators may justify systematic racial discrimination simply by asserting that such discrimination is necessary to achieve ‘the educational benefits of diversity,’ without explaining-much less proving-why the discrimination is needed or how the discriminatory plan is well crafted to serve its objectives.” In his view, the University of Texas, once the target of a civil-rights lawsuit charging it with discriminating against Black people, was now discriminating, just as unacceptably, against others. Alito was complaining about U.T.’s version of this effort, but affirmative action has been controversial from the beginning, because more Black students usually means fewer students of other ethnicities. In the years after the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, many colleges and universities made a concerted effort to become more racially integrated. Its success made it obvious that much of the rest of the country was segregated, too, in fact if not always explicitly by law. The civil-rights revolution ended the Jim Crow system of legally mandated racial segregation in the South. “This is affirmative action gone berserk,” he declared. Alito, with steely indignation, picked apart the logic of U.T.’s arguments and of his colleagues’ majority opinion. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds, upheld Texas’s admissions policy. A white applicant who had been denied admission had sued, saying that she’d been discriminated against because of her race. In June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench a version of his lengthy dissent in the case of Fisher v. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |