On Friday, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark win against institutionalized racism by striking down affirmative action in college admissions. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that race-based promotion of applicants violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
That doesn’t mean race can never be a factor, but it does means that monolithic favoritism of a single racial group is no longer legal. You could still explain your unique situation in an essay and have it judged on an individual level, but simply checking a box is no longer a way to gain an immediate advantage based on an inalienable characteristic. Of course, that assumes these colleges follow the law and don’t immediately begin mining for possible loopholes.
But I digress, the reaction from Democrats to the affirmative action decisions has quickly descended into racist hysteria, and you can always leave it to Jemele Hill and Soledad O’Brien to deliver the hottest of takes. Before we get there, though, here’s what set them off.
Objectively, affirmative action is discriminatory. That should be enough to understand why Yiatin Chu was fighting against it. Discrimination under any banner is still discrimination, and last I checked, Democrats are supposed to be against institutional racism. Remember all the shouting about “systemic racism?” That has suddenly gone out the window replaced by demands for a racial caste system.
How broken must one be for that to be their reaction? Think about what’s being suggested in those posts. According to Hill and O’Brien, Asian Americans must continue to suffer discrimination lest they become pawns of “white supremacy” that are harming “people of color.” That’s about as perverted and immoral of an assertion as I can imagine in dealing with this topic. It effectively demands that Asian Americans become
It’s also pretty gross to suggest that Asian Americans should remain an institutional sub-class because they benefit from the equal application of the law following the civil rights movement. Last I checked, many Asian Americans are descended from what amounted to near-slave labor in the late 19th century, where their ancestors were forced into dangerous, often deadly situations. Is the idea that they all just bought a first-class airline ticket and flew over a few years ago?
To suggest Asian Americans haven’t paid their dues in some way and thus shouldn’t benefit from the 14th Amendment is racist tripe. But even for the individual Asians who are more recent immigrants to America, it is still immoral to discriminate against them. Rights don’t cease to be rights because of a lack of American ancestral claims. That should be something we all agree on, but there is nothing consistent or logical about the far left. It’s all about policy preferences, and if racism enables something a Democrat wants, then racism is good again.
Here’s that idea put more succinctly.
Lastly, putting all the legal arguments aside, has anyone stopped to ask how affirmative action in college admissions even benefits black Americans? Is admitting someone with a far lower test score over someone with a higher one putting the former person in the position to succeed? Or are they just being thrown into the fire with a high probability of failure?
For people like Hill and O’Brien, those questions don’t matter. They see everything through a hyper-racialized lens that is not undergirded by any basic principles of fairness and equality.