affirmative action 2 bak

6 22

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SEE DEI AA 3

bad code see bak

see white grievance

see rubber glue reverse

see doj2 918

mod doh! 12/152nd 11/16

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one of clarence targets [reagan]

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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158887

Reagan is a revered figure in American life. Certainly, liberals are critical of his legacy on many counts. But Americans in general rank him as one of our greatest presidents, perhaps most of all because of his role in ending the Cold War.

Yet a specter hovers over Reagan’s reputation, one too little addressed by historians. This is his disturbing record on issues of race and civil rights.

There has been much fine history written in recent years about the white “backlash” against the progress of racial equality in American life, a backlash dating back to the 1940s. Yet, rather oddly, Reagan and Reaganism—the broader political tendency he represented, which generally favored limited government at home and military supremacy abroad—have not figured centrally in these counter-histories to the era of progressive strides toward freedom. Ronald Reagan was the most successful and effective white backlash politician in the post-Brown era, and the conservative appeal to white voters as white voters was a central component in the broader politics of Reaganism.

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After these historic measures were firmly in place, Reagan—perfectly representing broader tactical shifts within the conservative movement—pivoted to a new stance. Now he supported individualistic civil rights protections, but he framed the new danger on the race front as that of “quotas,” by which he meant affirmative action.

I know of no instance where Reagan explicitly acknowledged his change of position on civil rights, although perhaps such evidence exists somewhere. “Certainly no one of us would challenge government’s right and responsibility to eliminate discrimination in hiring and education,” he told one audience when he ran for president in 1976. Actually, Reagan had spent years “challenging” exactly this. Reagan went on to say, “If your ancestry is Czechoslovakian, Polish, Italian, or if you are of the Jewish faith, you may find yourself the victim of discrimination” in favor of presumably less deserving African Americans, because of affirmative action policies.

Reagan’s exploitation of racial tension proved more a political tool for gaining power in the 1980s than an essential component of Reaganite governance. This, however, does not mean that Reagan’s racial backlash politics played no role in his policymaking. It was something he believed in, but, as a politician of great skill and calculation, Reagan made necessary compromises on race matters.

After Reagan became president in 1981, he pursued no onslaught against affirmative action. Some Republicans supported at least some forms of this policy, and the issue had done its necessary work for Reagan, helping him with certain segments of the electorate as he captured the White House. Instead of issuing executive orders curtailing affirmative action, Reagan chose the slower course of naming executive and judicial appointees who showed little zeal for civil rights enforcement in general. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, now chaired by Clarence Thomas, became far less active. Most important were Reagan’s judicial nominees, including Sandra Day O’Connor, who became the stealth conservative on the U.S. Supreme Court, her reputation as a moderate—based largely on her unwillingness to overturn Roe v. Wade—belied by her lead role in decisions that undid certain affirmative action policies and the cold treatment she generally gave plaintiffs of color who alleged discrimination.

The racial politics of Reaganism are displayed in two legislative episodes. In 1982, Reagan signed a twenty-five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act, maintaining the need for “preclearance” with the U.S. government for any change in voting laws in a list of jurisdictions with ugly histories of political apartheid. Reagan’s popularity was at a low point; the deep recession of 1981-82 had put him back on his heels politically. Non-southern Republicans in Congress did not want to go to the mat to get the largely southern jurisdictions covered by the Act out from under the preclearance burden. So Reagan signed the extension, compromising his principles. (In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court vitiated the preclearance provision of the Act.)

In 1988, with Reagan’s presidency waning, he vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which Congress had passed after forging a bipartisan coalition designed to undo the Supreme Court’s Grove City College decision of 1984, which had opened the door to discrimination against all legally “protected classes” by private educational institutions and other organizations. By this time, Reagan had little clout on Capitol Hill and there was not much of a White House operation designed to sustain the veto. With no elections left to run, Reagan was making a point and demonstrating his convictions. His explanation for his veto—which Congress quickly overrode—was that the pending law would “unjustifiably extend the power of the federal government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.” This was anti‒civil rights boilerplate; he could have used the same words to explain his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1984, when Reagan won an historic reelection victory, 85 percent of Americans casting votes were white. Reagan got about two thirds of their votes. This by itself spelled a huge win for him. This is not to say that white voters all voted for Reagan because they were white. But Reagan rode the white backlash—along with other major issues, to be sure—farther than anyone else ever did in American history, before or since. It is long since time that historians of Reagan, Reaganism, and the 1980s overcame their reluctance to tell this basic part of that era’s history plainly.

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central fla univ

note always defensive, we did not start fight [but will end it]

an bad 2 23

Appearing to confess frustration, far-right Republican governor Ron DeSantis says he is remaking Florida’s education system because even after turning the state’s Democratic Party into a "rotten carcass on the side of the street," the left "can still impose their agenda on my people."

That "agenda," apparently includes so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT), Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, according to far-right Fox News host Mark Levin who told the Florida governor the right is "in a culture war."

"We didn't start it," Levin told DeSantis. "But what I call the Marxist left, they started it. It is devouring our institutions. It is devouring our politics. It's devouring the private sector."

DeSantis did not disagree.

As he uses the power of his office to pave the road for a likely 2024 run for the White House, DeSantis has not gone unnoticed. He has been accused of being "an Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist," turning Florida into "a laboratory for fascism," running his state "like a fascist," and being a "fascist for our time" and a "one-man civil rights wrecking ball, determined to neutralize any group that doesn't conform to his dangerously narrow view of social order."

All those accusations were before his Sunday night Fox News interview with Levin, who warned that "in the classrooms" there is "the sexualizing of little kids." Levin also said, "Disney, Walt Disney has to be rolling in his grave right now what's happened to Disneyland and Disney World and these other events in the culture."

Asked why he decided to take "the lead in taking this on as far as governors go," DeSantis bragged, "I got reelected November 2022. Largest vote than any Republican governor [in] Florida history has got, largest vote margin any governor candidates ever got. 1.5 million votes."

"I can win by 1.5 million votes. Make the Democratic Party in our state, basically, a rotten carcass on the side of the street. And yet, the left can still impose their agenda on my people if I'm not looking after fighting ESG and other woke companies and some of the stuff going on in the universities and the schools."

"And so I think I have an understanding that these fights are far broader than just one particular election. Yes, you do have to fight the woke in the halls of government and in the legislative chambers, and we have super majorities as Republicans in Florida so we will win all those fights, but you also have to be willing to defend your folks against thisagenda being shoved down their throatfrom all these otherinstitutions,where these people aren't necessarily coming up for election."

DeSantis has infamously veered into pushing his supporters into local school board positions of power.

"So you talk about things with like the young kids and with Disney, and I see that not just through the eyes of a governor but also through the eyes of a dad," DeSantis continued. "You know, we have a six, a four, and a two-year-old at home. And we just believe as parents, we should be able to send our kids to school, have them watch cartoons without having somebody's sexual agenda shoved down their throats."

"And so when this issue came up, with the sexualization of the curriculum, of course in Florida, we think that that's inappropriate. And you know what? Republican, Democrat, Independent parents agree with us overwhelmingly."

That's debatable. In October Florida Politics reported, "Majorities oppose Ron DeSantis-backed 'Stop WOKE' and parental rights laws," including his "Don't Say Gay" law.

In January, a study by UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute found a large percentage of LGBTQ parents say they are concerned their families will be negatively impacted by DeSantis' laws, including HB 1557, the "Don't Say Gay" law – with some saying they already have been.

"Almost 9 out of 10 (88%) LGBTQ+ parents are very or somewhat concerned about the impact that HB 1557 will have on them and their children, with one in four reporting they have experienced anti-LGBTQ harassment since the law was passed and one in five reporting becoming less out in their communities since the law was passed. Parents have considered a variety of coping strategies in response to the bill, including moving out of the state (56%) and moving their children to a different school (11%). Over 16% of LGBTQ parents have already taken steps to move their families to another state."

Watch a short clip or the full interview below or at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-and-jack-posobiec-claim-concern-about-equity-reminiscent-apartheid-south

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): And Jack, here's one of the tragedies – it will create more bigotry and more stereotyping. So,

JACK POSOBIEC (GUEST): Of course.

KIRK: So if you areboarding a United Airlines flight and you see a Black pilot, they are conditioning you to think, I don't know if he's there because he's a wonderful pilot, and that's not good. I don't want to live in that country. I don't want to have that kind of lens. But that will be a rational thought that someone will have because of, now, the hiring quotas and because of the way that we are now putting people in positions of authority and power. They are changing medical licensing exams. I hope everyone knows this. They are changing medical licensing exams so that it is pass-fail because different scores were used to award residencies and those were, of course, racist. One minute, Jack.

JACK POSOBIEC (GUEST): You remember this famously came up with Mindy Kaling's brother. So the famous actress Mindy Kaling came out in 2015 and says, I faked being Black, and that's how I got into medical school. This can't be – obvious they're of Indian descent, but he decided to fake being Black, was able to get into medical school, was able to go all the way through and say, there's no way that you can choose – there's no way that you can threaten me.

So, Charlie, I think the way out of this really is for everyone to just go ahead and identify with whatever you feel works for you –

KIRK: That's terrible.

POSOBIEC: If you want to identify as multiracial, as quasi racial, pseudo race, whatever. Go for it. Because who is actually going to question this? How are they going to --

KIRK: I mean --

POSOBIEC: It would be one way to break the system.

KIRK: What they call equity, is they want to create a world where you are in a deficit if you are white. That is that is the world they're trying to create. And it's really cruel to say that. But when they say equity, they're trying to make it where you have a structural disadvantage through hiring –

POSOBIEC: Almost like apartheid.

KIRK: Of course it is.

POSOBIEC: It almost sounds like apartheid.

KIRK: But that is what South Africa did. South Africa took the awful, kind of, immoral approach to apartheid and they just flipped it upside down. They just said, ok, now we're going to extract revenge on the colonizers because now we're in charge. And South Africa is not a functioning country.

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right-wing media weaponize the East Palestine train derailment to claim white conservatives are being persecuted

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DN ed blum knew he needed asian // jews harvard

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salon 11 22

"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter.And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?

None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.

Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.

The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.

The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.

The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.

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8 pp ltr refuse ; egs of dem object to votes in various elections; bennie NEW nation of islam

charles burnham eastman atty; claims she did not know much about what JE was doing post election; unrelenting efforts to overturn election' is false "; TP truce denied by both, stockton's src denies?

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forbes

...cRUCIAL QUOTE

Thompson told reporters last week Thomas’ testimony would “[add] to the body of knowledge about whether or not she had additional information as to what went on, on January 6.”

CHIEF CRITIC

Thomas has denied discussing her work with her husband or having any influence on his work as a justice. Paoletta denied allegations that Thomas was personally involved with efforts to overturn the election in his letter to the committee and criticized its members as being biased against Thomas and her husband. “Given the animus already directed at Mrs. Thomas and Justice Thomas, I have serious concerns about the fairness of any interview,” Paoletta wrote.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

The House committee is expected to soon hold its first public hearing in months—and potentially its final hearing. The hearing was supposed to take place on Wednesday but was rescheduled due to Hurricane Ian. Thompson told reporters Thursday Thomas’ testimony could make it into the hearing ““if there’s something of merit,” CNN reports. The committee will then issue a final report detailing all its findings after the hearings have concluded, though it’s still unclear when exactly that will be.

SURPRISING FACT

Lawmakers initially declined to ask Thomas to testify before the emails between her and Eastman were reported, which the New York Times reported in March was due in part to objections from Republican committee member Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.). The Times reports there was resistance within the committee to going after Thomas because it could hurt Clarence Thomas’ reputation—three of his former clerks also have “major roles” in the investigation,the Times reports—and because committee members believed she was “a distraction from more important targets.”

KEY BACKGROUND

Thomas has drawn widespread scrutiny for her links to the wide-ranging effort to overturn the 2020 election, which were taking place as her husband considered lawsuits challenging the election results at the Supreme Court. In addition to her correspondence with Eastman, Thomas also exchanged text messages with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which she urged him to challenge the election results, and sent emails to lawmakers in multiple states pushing efforts to contest the vote count. A group she’s linked to was also involved with the “fake electors” scheme in which GOP officials submitted false slates of electors to Congress claiming Trump won their states, and she has said she was briefly present at the rally on January 6 that preceded the attack on the Capitol building. In his letter to lawmakers, Paoletta denied that any of her efforts constitute wrongdoing: her correspondence with Eastman was merely asking him to speak to one of her groups, her texts with Meadows were her “simply texting with a friend” and the emails she sent to lawmakers were form letters that Thomas did not draft or edit herself, and she “simply pushed a few buttons,” Paoletta alleged.

CHIEF CRITIC

Justice Thomas has hit back against suggestions the court is politicized, saying in a September speech he believes it’s a misconception. “If [the media thinks] you’re anti-abortion or something personally, they think that that’s the way you always will come out,” Thomas said. “They think you become like a politician. And I think that’s a problem.”

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

Whether Justice Thomas will recuse himself from any upcoming cases that could be a conflict of interest. The court will soon hear a challenge to affirmative action policies backed by a group on whose board Ginni also sits, which has sparked calls for him to recuse, and the New Yorker reports she has ties to the leader of a group that’s brought two other upcoming cases to the court. The Washington Post notes that while justices are supposed to recuse themselves in cases that could pose a conflict, there’s no actual enforcement mechanism requiring them to do so. Legal scholars have advocated for the high court to take up a code of conduct that would impose a process for preventing conflicts of interest, but the court has not yet said whether they intend to do so.

TANGENT

Though the “fake electors” plot was known at the time it happened, the strategy—which resulted in seven false slates of GOP electors in states Biden won—has resurfaced in recent months, after the House January 6 committee released documents in December showing former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was involved in discussions about the plot. The committee has issued subpoenas to many of the false electors in an attempt to learn more about the origins of the plot and the Trump campaign’s involvement. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told CNN the Justice Department is also investigating the scheme, after multiple states’ attorneys general referred the certificates to the DOJ and asked them to look into it.

TOPLINE The U.S. Supreme Court will hear cases challenging Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC)’s affirmative action policies that take race into account for admissions, the court announced Monday, which could potentially overturn the decades-old practice of affirmative action and threaten gains in diversity at colleges and universities nationwide.

KEY FACTS

The court announced it would take up the cases without comment, and it’s not clear yet whether the cases will be heard this term or after the Supreme Court’s next term begins in October.

The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sued Harvard University for allegedly discriminating against Asian-American applicants in its admissions process and unfairly favoring other applicants of color, accusing it of using a “racial hierarchy” in its admissions process.

The same group also sued UNC in order to cover both public and private universities—noting UNC is the oldest public college in the U.S.—and alleged the university’s policy violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by not guaranteeing racial neutrality.

Harvard and UNC have denied the accusations their affirmative action policies are discriminatory and argue they’re in line with previous court rulings upholding the practice, and UNC said it “considers race flexibly as merely one factor among numerous factors” in its admissions process.

Harvard said getting rid of race considerations in its admissions would result in “steep declines in diversity,” noting taking race out of the equation entirely would reduce enrollment of Black students at the school from 14% to 6% of its student body, and Hispanic enrollment from 14% to 9%.

Both the district and appeals court ruled in Harvard’s favor and upheld their admissions policy, and a district court ruled in UNC’s favor, but SFFA appealed the case to the Supreme Court before an appeals court could rule so that it could be heard with the Harvard case.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held up affirmative action in the past, but there are fears it will now be overturned given the court’s 6-3 conservative majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have already ruled against affirmative action in the past, as has Chief Justice John Roberts, who once wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“Harvard’s mistreatment of Asian-American applicants is appalling,” SFFA alleged in its Supreme Court complaint, calling the case “the kind of important individual rights dispute that this Court has not hesitated to hear.” “Review thus would be warranted if the defendant were any university subject to Title VI. But it isn’t just any university. It’s Harvard.”

CHIEF CRITIC

The Supreme Court’s past rulings on affirmative action “sent a powerful signal that diversity is vital to preparing individuals to work and participate as citizens in our pluralistic democracy,” Harvard wrote in its opposition to SFFA’s complaint. “Americans have come to view diversity as integral to learning and to trust that the path to leadership is open to all. Overruling those cases at this time would undermine the public’s faith in those foundational principles.”

KEY BACKGROUND

The concept of “affirmative action” to ensure racial diversity dates back to a 1965 executive order that told employers to “take affirmative action to ensure that equal opportunity is provided in all aspects of their employment.” The Supreme Court then officially sanctioned affirmative action in college admissions in a 1978 ruling that found universities could constitutionally consider race as part of its admissions process, though it struck down schools using quota systems dedicating a certain number of enrollment places to students of a particular race. Since then, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held up affirmative action policies in 2003 and 2016, though it struck down a “point system” at the University of Michigan that automatically gave applications from underrepresented racial minorities enough points to virtually guarantee admission. While critics of affirmative action policies contend they discriminate against white and Asian American students, proponents say the practice is necessary for ensuring diversity both at universities and the workforce at large. Harvard also alleged that not considering race in admissions would have “adverse effects on Harvard’s ability to create an environment that promotes cross-racial interactions and that lessens feelings of alienation and isolation.”

TANGENT

The Trump Administration had strongly backed the case against Harvard, filing a brief in support of SFFA in 2018 when the case was at a lower court and filing separate affirmative action complaints against Yale University that the Biden Administration later dropped.William Cosovoy, the lead attorney for SFFA, has represented former President Donald Trump in private lawsuits concerning the release of his tax returns.The Biden administration, however, told the Supreme Court in December it should not take up the Harvard case, arguing the lower court rulings that upheld the school’s policy were decided correctly and the case is an “unsuitable vehicle” for the court to overturn its previous affirmative action rulings.

FURTHER READING

The Supreme Court case that could end affirmative action, explained (Vox)

A Timeline of Key Supreme Court Cases on Affirmative Action (New York Times)

Justices Consider Harvard Case On Race In College Admissions (Associated Press)

University of North Carolina and civil rights advocates ask Supreme Court to sidestep affirmative action challenge (CNN)

Alison Durkee

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https://www.propublica.org/article/a-colorblind-constitution-what-abigail-fishers-affirmative-action-case-is-r

when the NAACP began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South, it knew that, in the battle for public opinion, the particular plaintiffs mattered as much as the facts of the case. The group meticulously selected the people who would elicit both sympathy and outrage, who were pristine in form and character. And they had to be ready to step forward at the exact moment when both public sentiment and the legal system might be swayed.

That's how Oliver Brown, a hard-working welder and assistant pastor in Topeka, Kan., became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that would obliterate the separate but equal doctrine. His daughter, whose third-grade innocence posed a searing rebuff to legal segregation, became its face.

Nearly 60 years after that Supreme Court victory, which changed the nation, conservatives freely admit they have stolen that page from the NAACP's legal playbook as they attempt to roll back many of the civil rights group's landmark triumphs.

In 23-year-old Abigail Noel Fisher they've put forward their version of the perfect plaintiff to challenge the use of race in college admissions decisions.

Publicly, Fisher and her supporters, chief among them the conservative activist who conceived of the case, have worked to make Fisher the symbol of racial victimization in modern America. As their narratives goes, she did everything right. She worked hard, received good grades, and rounded out her high school years with an array of extracurricular activities. But she was cheated, they say, her dream snatched away by a university that closed its doors to her because she had been born the wrong color: White.

The daughter of suburban Sugar Land, Texas, played the cello. Since the second grade, she said, she dreamed of carrying on the family tradition by joining her sister and father among the ranks of University of Texas at Austin alumni.

And the moment for her to lend her name to the lawsuit might never be riper: The Supreme Court has seated its most conservative bench since the 1930s. The Court is expected to issue a decision any week now in what is considered one of the most important civil rights cases in years.

On a posted by Edward Blum, a 1973 University of Texas graduate whose nonprofit organization is bankrolling the lawsuit, she is soft-spoken, her strawberry blond hair tucked behind one ear. Not even a swipe of lip gloss adorns her girlish face.

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"

It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.

Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.

In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.

If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.

Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.

Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.

In 2008, the year Fisher sent in her application, competition to get into the crown jewel of the Texas university system was stiff. Students entering through the university's Top 10 program — a mechanism that granted automatic admission to any teen who graduated in the upper 10 percent of his or her high school class — claimed 92 percent of the in-state spots.

Fisher said in news reports that she hoped for the day universities selected students "solely based on their merit and if they work hard for it." But Fisher failed to graduate in the top 10 percent of her class, meaning she had to compete for the limited number of spaces up for grabs.

She and other applicants who did not make the cut were evaluated based on two scores. One allotted points for grades and test scores. The other, called a personal achievement index, awarded points for two required essays, leadership, activities, service and "special circumstances." Those included socioeconomic status of the student or the student's school, coming from a home with a single parent or one where English wasn't spoken. And race.

Those two scores, combined, determine admission.

Even among those students, Fisher did not particularly stand out. Court records show her grade point average (3.59) and SAT scores (1180 out of 1600) were good but not great for the highly selective flagship university. The school's rejection rate that year for the remaining 841 openings was higher than the turn-down rate for students trying to get into Harvard.

As a result, university officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.

It's true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.

Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.

In an interview last month, Blum agreed Fisher's credentials and circumstances make it difficult to argue — as he and his supporters have so ardently in public — that but for her race Fisher would have been a Longhorn.

"There are some Anglo students who had lower grades than Abby who were admitted also," Blum told ProPublica. "Litigation like this is not a black and white paradigm."

Blum started his one-man nonprofit, the Project on Fair Representation, in 2005. The organization is funded by deep-pocketed conservatives to, according to its website, influence "jurisprudence, public policy, and public attitudes regarding race and ethnicity" in voting, education, contracting and employment. To do so, Blum — who is not a lawyer — helps arrange pro bono representation to fight race-based policies that were meant to address inequalities.

According to a Reuters profile, Blum has brought at least a dozen lawsuits against such programs and laws — including four that made it to the Supreme Court. He has two on the current docket, Fisher and the Shelby County, Ala., case challenging a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

In the Fisher case, while the young woman may have lent her name to the lawsuit, the case before the Court has very little to do with her. Her name appears just five times in the thousands of words that make up the body of the complaint. She has already gone on to graduate from Louisiana State University, her second choice, and is working in finance at a firm in Austin.

Asked by a news reporter what harm she had suffered, she cited only her inability to tap into UT's alumni network and possibly missing out on a better first job. If she wins, Fisher seeks only the return of her application fee and housing deposit — a grand total of $100 in damages.

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the**14th Amendment**itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race.

It's an argument first successfully championed by the NAACP and other civil rights groups, most notably in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court declared the notion of "separate but equal" to be a fallacy.

"In its history, colorblindness has this progressive, anti-racist push behind it," said Ian Haney-López, a constitutional scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

But following the Brown decision, the very groups that had ardently — and violently — defended laws mandating separation by race used the notion of a colorblind Constitution to challenge court orders to integrate schools.

"They began to say, yes, the Constitution is colorblind, and so the state cannot distinguish between races when it tried to remedy segregation," he said.

As a result of Southern resistance, it would take six years after Brown before 6-year old Ruby Bridges, wearing crisp white socks and black-bowed shoes, became the first black student to attend a white elementary school in the South. The image of the diminutive brown-skinned girl who needed U.S. marshals to protect her from an angry white mob inspired Norman Rockwell to preserve the moment in a painting that now hangs in the White House occupied by the first black president.

Initially, the Supreme Court unambiguously knocked those arguments down. In a 1971 ruling, it said that government could not mandate colorblindness when doing so would defeat the integration requirement of Brown v. Board of Education. A few years later, in a ruling on affirmative action, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take race into account. There is no other way."

But as the Supreme Court's make-up has grown more conservative, it has taken up a steady stream of so-called reverse discrimination cases, in which white plaintiffs have argued that race-specific measures born of the civil rights movement discriminate against white Americans and violate the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court decisions have eroded programs and laws that use race to remedy inequalities, but not eliminated them altogether. And in a 2003 opinion written by centrist Sandra Day O'Connor, the justices narrowly upheld affirmative action in college admissions when it is the only means to ensure diversity.

But the Court's make-up changed in what scholars consider a significant way when Samuel Alito, considered the third most conservative Supreme Court justice since 1937, replaced O'Connor in 2006. Since then, several justices have made their constitutional disdain for race-conscious programs known. In a controversial 2007 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts sent a clear message when he used the equal protection argument at play in Brown v. Board of Education to strike down voluntary desegregation plans in schools.

Evoking a colorblind Constitution, Roberts said, "The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race, is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

And just last month during oral arguments over the constitutionality of a key aspect of the Voting Rights Act, Justice Antonin Scalia derisively called what's considered the most successful civil rights law in history a "racial entitlement."

Public opinion on race has changed over time as well. In the 1950s, surveys show, most white Americans believed that black Americans faced substantial discrimination but that they themselves experienced little. Today, despite gaping disparities between black and white Americans in income, education, health care, homeownership, employment and college admissions, a majority of white Americans now believe they are just as likely, or more likely, to face discrimination as black Americans.

Blum chose the University of Texas to mount what could be a decisive challenge to affirmative action in college admissions because it already had what was regarded as a "race-neutral" process — the Top 10 program. Since many Texas high schools remain segregated, taking the top 10 percent of students from black and Latino high schools ensured a substantial population of students of color at the UT.

As a consequence, Blum believed he could challenge whether the additional use of race to fill out the entering class passed constitutional muster.

To get standing in court, Blum needed a victim. That's when he started looking for a version of the Brown family, someone who could represent the arguable hurt caused when public officials used race.

This approach, too, mirrors an NAACP tactic from half a century ago. Then, knowing the Supreme Court was unlikely to throw out segregation in one fell swoop, the civil rights group brought a narrower challenge to segregated school facilities first.

One of those cases, ironically, targeted the same university as Blum — the University of Texas at Austin. The university, which had been closed to black students since its founding, denied the law school application of Heman Marion Sweatt because the state constitution required that black and white students attend separate schools.

Because Texas had no black law school, the NAACP sued, arguing that the state violated the constitutional mandate to provide equal facilities for black and white students. The Supreme Court ruled that the hastily put together black law school created to avoid admitting Sweatt could not possibly be equal. It ordered Texas to admit Sweatt as its first black student in 1950.

That suit launched the stone that would shatter separate but equal just four years later when the Court struck down segregation in schools in Brown.

Blum and his supporters hope to use the Fisher case, and the 14th Amendment challenge to the Voting Rights Act that Blum is also behind, in the same way.

According to Blum, the Constitution sees affirmative action policies — in college, in contracting, in employment — and Jim Crow laws as twin evils.

"I don't see the distinction," he said.

But several constitutional scholars interviewed for this piece dispute this notion. Neil Siegel of Duke University called this interpretation of the 14th Amendment "perverse." Georgetown law professor Girardeau A. Spann called it "discriminatory."

While the 14th Amendment doesn't mention race, the drafters went on to pass race-specific legislation aimed at helping former slaves and other black Americans overcome more than a century of racial oppression.

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, said that the concept of colorblindness holds great rhetorical appeal but that "there is no basis for concluding that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause requires colorblindness." In drafting the 14th Amendment, he said, Congress recognized "an enormous difference between a white majority disadvantaging minorities and a white majority acting to remedy past discrimination."

Conservatives challenging these types of programs purport to champion the legacy of the civil rights movement, Haney-Lopez said, but the historical roots of their efforts are much more cynical.

"I think that is incredibly important that people realize that today's proponents of colorblindness pretend that they are the heirs to Thurgood Marshall and John Marshall Harlan," he said. "But that is a lie. They are the heirs of Southern resistance to integration. And the colorblindness arguments that they use come directly from the Southern efforts to defeat Brown v. Board of Education."

Ilya Shapiro, a senior constitutional studies fellow at the Cato Institute, which filed an amicus brief supporting Fisher, thinks otherwise.

"I am not going to speak to anyone else's motives. It is unfair to paint people with the Jim Crow brush because they have those kinds of arguments," he said. "I don't like people being judged based on the color of their skin." If a program "treats people different because one has a different skin color, I find that offensive and I think the Constitution does as well."

But when asked why the drafters created programs targeted to black Americans if they did not intend the Constitution to allow the government to use race to help minority groups, Shapiro said, "It was a curious period."

At the same time Congress drafted the equal protection clause, he said, it also "voted for segregated schools in the District of Columbia."

That example is the very same one that segregationists Strom Thurmond and Richard Brevard Russell used when they drafted the 1956 Southern Manifesto urging officials to resist the Supreme Court's use of the equal protection clause to overturn school segregation.

The impact of a ruling that bans all racial considerations by universities, employers and governments "could have devastating impact on the ability to overcome past inequalities," Siegel said.

Few experts think Blum and his supporters are apt to win that big a victory in the Fisher case. And so he will likely be on the hunt again for another case, and another perfect plaintiff.

Nikole Hannah-Jones covered civil rights and fair housing for ProPublica. Previously, she covered governmental issues, the census, and race and ethnicity at The Oregonian.

Nikole.Hannah-Jones@propublica.org
@nhannahjones

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an 6 22

The University of Houston has settled with a conservative free speech group that sued the school over an anti-discrimination policy that the group argued was overly broad and violated students’ First Amendment rights.

As part of the settlement, UH officials will have to pay $30,000 in attorney’s fees to Speech First and UH officials must keep in place its amended anti-discrimination policy.

In this case, Speech First, a group that actively litigates college policies they view as student censorship, targeted UH’s anti-discrimination policy that has been in place since 2012. According to that policy, unlawful harassment was defined as “humiliating, abusive, or threatening conduct or behavior that denigrates or shows hostility or aversion toward an individual or group” or conduct that created a hostile living or working environment or interfered with an individual’s academic or work performance.

Examples of such harassment included “epithets or slurs,” “negative stereotyping” and “denigrating jokes.”

It also stated “[m]inor verbal and nonverbal slights, snubs, annoyances, insults, or isolated incidents including, but not limited to microaggressions,” would be considered harassment if the actions occurred repeatedly and targeted a particular group of people based on their race, sex or gender or other status that keeps them protected from discrimination.

But in May, three months after Speech First filed its suit, the university amended its policy. Later that same month, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, a Reagan appointee, blocked the university from reinstating its original anti-harassment policy.

“This is a huge win for the First Amendment,” said Cherise Trump, executive director of Speech First, a group that pushes back against what it calls “toxic censorship culture” on campuses. “It sends a message to the University of Houston and other universities that they will be held accountable if they enact unconstitutional policies on campus.”...In a statement, UH officials said they have come to an “amicable” agreement and consider the matter resolved.

“As a result of our discussions, a revised&...anti-discrimination policy has been adopted,” Chris Stipes, director of UH media relations, said in a statement. “The UH System remains committed to protecting the constitutional rights of our students and employees.”

Speech First filed the lawsuit on behalf of three conservative students identified only as “A,” “B” and “C” who said they felt they could not express their beliefs on campus for fear they would be punished under UH’s older policy.

As examples, the lawsuit listed how the students feared retaliation if they shared personal beliefs such as “affirmative action in college admissions is racist” or “allowing biologically male athletes who identify as female to compete in women’s sports is fundamentally unjust.” All three said they were uncomfortable acknowledging fellow students’ preferred pronouns outside of a cisgender identity.

In documents, lawyers for the university argued that its policy specifically addresses unlawful harassment of students and would not consider those statements and ideas provided by the students in the lawsuit as a violation of the policy.

University lawyers have also argued there is no evidence that the anti-discrimination policy has ever been used against students.

When the university amended the anti-discrimination policy in mid-May, it specified that harassment must rise to the level of creating a hostile work environment for employees or to deny a student equal access to education by creating a hostile learning environment. That is the standard set by the 1999 Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which states that schools violate the Title IX ban on sex-based discrimination if they remain deliberately indifferent to sexual harassment to the point it prevents a student from receiving an equitable education.

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights under former President Donald Trump used that definition of sexual harassment when it issued revised rules and standards for investigating Title IX violations on college campuses, which was a more narrow definition for sexual harassment than any previously used.

Speech First lawyers argue that many universities, including UH, adopt harassment policies outside of that guidance that are too broad, providing a chilling effect to students’ free speech.

A UH lawyer said the definition of sexual harassment in the Davis case did not limit schools from enacting other policies to address unlawful harassment and should not be considered the standard for universities as they craft disciplinary policies to address other instances of inappropriate behavior.

“Speech First has tried to bootstrap Davis in numerous other cases, and to date none has held that Davis imposed the outer bounds for addressing unlawful harassment,” they wrote.

But when Hughes, the federal district judge, granted a preliminary injunction late last month preventing UH from reinstating its original anti-harassment policy, he sided with Speech First.

“Restraint on free speech is prohibited absent limited circumstances carefully proscribed by the Supreme Court. Any limitation deserves the upmost scrutiny,” he wrote, stating the group would likely win the case. “The University says that it will be injured if recourse is unavailable for harassment against students of faculty. As important as that is, students also need defenses against arbitrary professors.”

This is the latest victory for Speech First, which has sued universities across the country over free speech policies, including the University of Texas at Austin. The case against UT-Austin took a similar path. Speech First sued the university in 2018 over language in multiple freedom of expression policies. UT-Austin amended some of the policies before settling with the organization and agreed to discontinue the university’s Campus Climate Response Team, part of the division of student affairs and the division of diversity and student engagement that investigated student reports of bias incidents on campus.

This lawsuit comes as other free speech debates have bubbled up on Texas college campuses throughout this past academic year.

At Collin College in North Texas, three professors have sued the school, arguing their contracts were not renewed in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights on a variety of issues, including one professor who publicly criticized the school’s COVID-19 response.

Nearby at the University of North Texas in Denton, thousands of students and community members signed a petition calling on school administrators to expel a right-wing student, arguing her campus activism and statements opposing gender-affirming care for transgender children created an unsafe learning environment for transgender students on campus.

In that instance, administrators denounced the student’s comments, but they said she and her right-wing campus group had not violated any university policies.

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scotus?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/affirmative-action-is-not-what-its-enemies-say-it-is-but-that-doesnt-mean-that-six-republican-justices-wont-pretend-to-

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/affirmative-action-is-not-what-its-enemies-say-it-is-but-that-doesnt-mean-that-six-republican-justices-wont-pretendit/

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color blind means racism does not exist, esp systemic, CRT dog whistle ~ affirmative action presumably

https://www.mediamatters.org/five/foxs-jesse-watters-praises-glenn-youngkin-claiming-hes-bringing-back-martin-luther-kings

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< https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/critical-race-theory-affirmative-action How the critical race theory hysteria may be a death blow for affirmative action" ===

=== https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/federal-judge-rules-harvard-can-continue-to-use-race-as-one-of-its-factors-in-admissions-decisions Harpalani... For much of the year, Mr. Blum works out of a gray-shingle house in South Thomaston, Me., overlooking Penobscot Bay, in a stark landscape famously painted by Andrew Wyeth. He has a consulting business analyzing esoteric municipal bonds for a handful of wealthy families.

DonorsTrust, which distributes money from conservative and libertarian contributors to various causes, and nonprofits related to DonorsTrust gave almost $2.9 million to support Mr. Blum’s work from 2010 to 2015, said Lawson R. Bader, the trust’s president, citing the most recent publicly available figures.

Most of that money came from the Searle Freedom Trust, according to tax records and Kimberly O. Dennis, the president and chief executive of the trust, which was founded by Daniel C. Searle of the Searle pharmaceutical company.

The goals of the Searle trust, as stated on its website, are to create “an environment that promotes individual freedom and economic liberties, while encouraging personal responsibilities and a respect for traditional American values.” The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, another small-government group, gave $100,000 to the DonorsTrust for Mr. Blum’s causes in 2014 and $50,000 in 2012, tax records show. For Mr. Blum’s first suit, the racial gerrymandering case in 1993, he hired a real estate lawyer who agreed to represent him for six months for $7,000, Mr. Blum recalled. But when the case went to the Supreme Court, he knew he needed a Washington lawyer, and found a rising young lawyer willing to take it for nothing at the prestigious Wiley Rein law firm.

Since then, Wiley Rein has been practically his house counsel. Fisher and Shelby were argued by Bert Rein, an antitrust and commercial litigator who was a State Department appointee in the Nixon administration. Mr. Rein described Mr. Blum as a client like any other, but one who believed in legal activism, and said his cases were not done pro bono but for a fee, which may be negotiable. “We are not a ‘cause’ law firm,” Mr. Rein said. (In some cases Mr. Blum has won, his side has been able to recoup legal fees from the losing side.)

The Harvard case is being argued by William Consovoy, a younger partner who recently split away. He clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he has called “my hero.”

Some civil rights activists think that in suing Harvard, Mr. Blum is picking the wrong fight. Armand Derfner, a civil rights lawyer and constitutional law scholar in residence at the Charleston School of Law in South Carolina, said that admission to the Ivy League was arbitrary for reasons that had little to do with race.

...

booktv texas (wright) tex tried smart top 10% of all HS, but did not work?

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The war on the southern border, the Muslim ban, and mass detention of immigrants—President Trump seems determined to claw America back into the nation’s racist past one executive order at a time. In its crusade against educational equity, the Justice Department has emerged as the White House’s stealth weapon against civil rights. It is now moving quietly to dismantle the policy of affirmative action: Supposedly aiming to combat “reverse racism,” the administration has rescinded key Obama-era policy guidance that upheld the principle of encouraging diversity in K-12 and higher education. Although the removal of this guidance does not alter past court precedents or repeal any laws directly, veteran civil-rights advocates are wary that, under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the administration has been moving steadily to work “separate but equal” back into the nation’s classrooms.

Dennis Park, head of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, described the move as an attempt to “reverse the progress achieved over the more than half century since Brown v. [Board] of Education.” But he added that the law would ultimately “be determined by the Supreme Court and not an Administration which seems bent on promoting division.”

The problem is that “separate but equal” persists in our public schools, if not in the letter of the law, then in the structural and cultural barriers driving de facto school segregation. And in the larger war for equitable education for all, some right-wing Asian Americans have been enlisted to provide a demographic twist on the escalating affirmative-action culture war. The Trump administration’s rollbacks parallel a major lawsuit against Harvard University, led by right-wing groups, claiming that Asian Americans and whites have been victimized by admissions policies that unfairly favor black and Latino applicants. Last fall, the Trump administration shifted its focus in civil-rights enforcement to scrutinizing what it called “intentional race-based discrimination.” The Justice Department officially backed the suit this week, while the university was filing final briefs in the hopes of avoiding a trial, further bolstering right-wing arguments that programs supporting black and Latino academic advancement are anti-meritocratic and unfairly discriminatory.

The Harvard case also echoes a debate unfolding in New York over school-diversity policies, where some Asian-American community advocates have assailed efforts to promote racial diversity in the city’s prized magnet schools by altering the testing protocols for acceptance to these schools.

The Trump administration’s political reversal on affirmative action, and the advancement of conservative legal attacks in the courts, reflects a generally reactionary climate in the politics of education. As with welfare reform and “zero-tolerance” policing, the pushback against affirmative action cloaks its racist subtext in a rhetoric of “defending” the civil rights of whites and Asian Americans.

Progressive Asian-American groups warn that their communities are being used a political cudgel in the affirmative-action debate. Thirty-five Asian-American civil-rights organizations and many academics filed amicus briefs defending affirmative action this week in the Harvard case. Racial barriers remain pervasive in both the K-12 education system and in higher education, and the real problems lie in discrimination on many levels, from social background, to different levels of academic preparedness, to unequal funding, and housing segregation—not simply whether the admissions officer at an elite school sees an Asian surname on the application.

According to Nicole Ochi, an attorney at Advancing Justice–Los Angeles, “Asian Americans are being used as a wedge in this debate, but really, affirmative action and race-conscious admissions policies are beneficial for all communities of color, including Asian Americans.”

Jason Fong, an Asian-American high-school student who joined Advancing Justice’s 2016 amicus brief for the Harvard case, testified, “We know that in real life, an Ivy League pedigree is not enough to stop people from screaming at us to ‘go home’ or to stop U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from picking us up or stop TSA from racially profiling and escorting us off an airplane. Thus, if we are trying to use education as some sort of shield against discrimination, it isn’t working…. I feel it’s important for Asian Americans like myself to ask why we aren’t doing more to fight against racism directly.” He also noted that his activism had led to backlash from other Asian Americans, who condemned him as a “race-traitor.”The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund argued in its brief filed on the Harvard case that allegations of anti-Asian discrimination obscure parallel socioeconomic inequities that transcend racial lines: “the Plaintiff’s broad-based attack will harm all minorities, including Asian Americans and especially those Asian American applicants in communities struggling with low educational attainment and low socioeconomic status.”

That affirmative action does not work as it should was actually an issue directly tackled in the Obama-era policy guidance that the Trump administration reversed. It was based on a 2007 landmark ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which allowed for some limited uses of race as a factor in K-12 student placements. Reflecting past decisions that opposed the use of racial quotas to promote integration, the ruling did not support explicitly race-based admissions criteria, but did acknowledge that there were legitimate uses of “school diversity [as] a compelling government interest,” and schools could apply affirmative-action principles more holistically.

Fortunately, many school districts nationwide continue to promote proactive school integration through community-based programs that aim to equalize funding and resources between predominantly white and predominantly black or Latino schools, or to encourage admissions policies that consider socioeconomic and ethnic background. However, the White House and Republican lawmakers have sought to withdraw federal support for these initiatives, signaling opposition even to such voluntary integration efforts to diversify public education.

Asian Americans are not driving the structural racism of the education system, of course. They have instead been enlisted in an ideological drive to make the education system more exclusionary and hierarchical, in the name of “academic competitiveness”—a drive that erases the very real history of anti-Asian racism and exclusionary immigration policies that is historically intertwined with the history of Jim Crow.

The political exploitation of Asian-American anxieties in the affirmative-action debate now threatens to pit different communities of color against each other while bolstering the overarching structure of white supremacy. But educational opportunity is not a zero-sum game. Everyone loses when educational institutions pursue false notions of “excellence” at the expense of real social equity—especially the children who must inherit another generation of inequality.

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economists

Amici — Professor Susan Dynarski, Professor Harry Holzer, Professor Hilary Hoynes, Professor Guido W. Imbens, Professor Alan B. Krueger, Professor Helen F. Ladd, Professor David S. Lee, Professor Trevon D. Logan, Professor Alexandre Mas, Professor Michael McPherson, Professor Jesse Rothstein, Professor Cecilia Rouse, Professor Robert M. Solow, Professor Lowell J. Taylor, Professor Sarah Turner, and Professor Douglas Webber — are leading economists and statisticians who regularly use and teach statistical analytical methods, including those used by Plaintiff’s expert, Dr. Peter S. Arcidiacono, and Defendant’s expert, Dr. David Card, in this case. Amici include, among others, a Nobel laureate, four former Chief Economists of federal agencies, current and former university administrators, editors of peer-reviewed journals, and multiple professors whose research focuses on higher education. Amici have a wide range of views about the appropriateness of using race as a factor in college admissions. However, they share the view that Dr. Card is one of the most outstanding and respected scholars in the field of econometrics and applied economics, that his statistical analyses in this case were methodologically sound, and that the criticisms of his modeling approach in the Brief of Economists as Amici Curiae in Support of Plaintiff, Dkt. 450 (“Plaintiff’s Amici Br.”), are not based on sound statistical principles or practices. Biographies of amici are summarized in Appendix A to this brief

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aug 2017 nyt

no lnx

y most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.

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The Harvard case asserts that the university’s admissions process amounts to an illegal quota system, in which roughly the same percentage of African-Americans, Hispanics, whites and Asian-Americans have been admitted year after year, despite fluctuations in application rates and qualifications.

“It falls afoul of our most basic civil rights principles, and those principles are that your race and your ethnicity should not be something to be used to harm you in life nor help you in life,” said Edward Blum, the president of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that is suing Harvard.

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His group, a conservative-leaning nonprofit based in Virginia, has filed similar suits against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, asserting that white students are at a disadvantage at those colleges because of their admissions policies.

The federal government potentially has the ability to influence university admissions policies by withholding federal funds under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in programs that receive federal money.

In many ways, the system the lawsuit is attacking is one Harvard points to with pride. The university has a long and pioneering history of support for affirmative action, going back at least to when Derek Bok, appointed president of Harvard in 1971, embraced policies that became a national model.

The university has extended that ethos to many low-income students, allowing them to attend free. Harvard has argued in a Supreme Court brief that while it sets no quotas for “blacks, or of musicians, football players, physicists or Californians,” if it wants to achieve true diversity, it must pay some attention to the numbers. The university has also said that abandoning race-conscious admissions would diminish the “excellence” of a Harvard education.

Melodie Jackson, a spokeswoman for Harvard, said that the university’s admissions policy was fair; that it looked at each applicant “as a whole person,” consistent with standards established by the Supreme Court; and that it promoted “the ability to work with people from different backgrounds, life experiences and perspectives.”

Harvard’s class of 2021 is 14.6 percent African-American, 22.2 percent Asian-American, 11.6 percent Hispanic and 2.5 percent Native American or Pacific Islander, according to data on the university’s website.

For the Harvard case, initially filed in 2014, Mr. Blum said, the federal court in Boston has allowed the plaintiffs to demand records from four highly competitive high schools with large numbers of Asian-American students: Stuyvesant High School in New York; Monta Vista High School in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.; and the Boston Latin School.

The goal is to look at whether students with comparable qualifications have different odds of admission that could be correlated with race and how stereotypes influence the process. A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges, a difference some have called “the Asian tax.”

The lawsuit also cites Harvard’s Asian-American enrollment at 18 percent in 2013, and notes very similar numbers ranging from 14 to 18 percent at other Ivy League colleges, like Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Yale.

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By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

The case, which is clearly aimed for the Supreme Court, puts Asian-Americans front and center in the latest stage of the affirmative action debate. The issue is whether there has been discrimination against Asian-Americans in the name of creating a diverse student body. The Justice Department, which has signaled that it is looking to investigate“intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” may well focus on Harvard.

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students for fair admissions

....

Michelle ChenTWITTERMichelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation

bert rien / wiley shelby v holder

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http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/03/local/la-me-0403-court-affirmative-action-20120403

Civil rights groups and aspiring minority college students have lost the latest bid to get the University of California to resume considering race in its admissions decisions.

Proposition 209 banned the state's public universities from using racial preferences to increase the ranks of black, Latino and Native American students, and the 1996 voter initiative has already withstood several constitutional challenges.

Two years ago, a class of prospective students and affirmative action advocates sued then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and UC President Mark Yudof, alleging that banning racial consideration in admissions resulted in the unfair exclusion of minority students and thus violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The lawsuit was dismissed last year by U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti, citing previous rulings dating back to a year after Proposition 209's passage that the admissions criteria meet constitutional standards....

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