Yesterday’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was a very big moment for the Supreme Court and for the country. It saw the majority not only end the left’s “approved” discrimination (affirmative action), but it also tore into the weak and baseless assertions of the dissent – something that is not done very often, let alone with the level of fervor with which Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas did it.
But the left is furious, and they are attacking the “Extreme MAGA Court” that handed them key wins in election law and immigration policy that Republicans were hoping to win. They have nevertheless decided, yet again, that this Court is illegitimate and must be destroyed – or expanded and stacked.
But the Court struck upon something extremely important in its decision yesterday. In the majority opinion, Roberts made it very clear:
“Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. “It depends,” says the dissent.
And that is at the heart of the scathing but nonsensical dissenting opinion put forward by Ketanji Brown Jackson – herself an affirmative action pick by Joe Biden. It may seem like a harsh claim, but that was literally Joe Biden’s promise. He vowed to nominate a black woman to the Court. She fit the bill, despite there being far more qualified judges on the left, and so she was chosen. Her opinion yesterday was full of emotion-based rhetoric and very little legal and constitutional argument. She cited a debunked study that claims black babies are twice as likely to survive with black doctors than white doctors.
But that study is a failure of skewed statistics and a classic case of “Correlation is not causation.”
“For high-risk black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die,” she wrote, citing a study put forward in the original case before the courts on affirmative action in universities.
The problem is that the study provided showed no such thing, and it’s a failure of not only her but the clerks who work under her that this opinion even made it out of the office. There’s a very good Twitter thread debunking the claim, but to summarize one of the key points, if a newborn is high-risk, they are sent to the NICU, which across the country are predominantly made up of white doctors. So if your baby has a black doctor, it’s more likely than not because your child is not in the NICU. Not because black doctors are twice as effective as keeping black babies alive.
But the greater problem with Justice Jackson’s dissent is that it so dismissively categorizes all people into tidy little stereotypes – many of the same stereotypes progressives have for years called conservatives racist for pointing out.
A sociologist named C. Wright Mills once wrote, essentially, that your “sociological imagination” – who you are as a person – is determined by the intersection of history and biography. Your life story and where it intersects with history make up who are. For the vast majority of people, race is an important aspect of that, and you cannot deny that, even in this modern day and age. But, to the left, in cases like affirmative action at Ivy universities and elsewhere, that should be the only aspect by which you are judged. Nothing else matters. That’s why some of the data coming out about Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions is so shocking – black students in the 40th or 50th percentile were accepted over Asian American students in the top percentile.
And so, as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard showed – and that the left has not at any point denied – it was Asian-American students who were discriminated against. I have actually seen the talking points out there that white people have gaslit Asian Americans into thinking they’ve been discriminated against when no one is denying they were. The left is just okay with discrimination against a minority group if the minority group has beat the “stigma” of minority status, something Asian Americans have done through hard work, an incredibly strong family dynamic, and a strong emphasis on scholarship.
And so, part of the story of who many of these students are has been their race and how it was used against them, all in an effort to allow another group to have an advantage. So, to combat discrimination, these colleges must utilize discrimination.
How in the world does that make sense? It shouldn’t. But that is the logic the left has adopted. We must perpetuate discrimination in order to combat discrimination. And the victims of this are the students who have done nothing wrong other than bust their tails to get into a good college. Their story was determined not by their work but by the racist policies of others… Sound familiar?