“This is not a normal Court,” US President Joe Biden said on Thursday after the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in university admissions. In ruling, the six conservative justices agreed that affirmative action amounts to unjust discrimination based on skin color, the three progressive justices pointed to the continuing imbalance of opportunity in the United States between residents of different origins.
“Discrimination still exists in America,” Biden said three times in response to the ruling. “Our country’s colleges and universities should be engines of increasing opportunity through social mobility. But today that is too often not the case.”
Affirmative action, Biden underlined, is discrimination made in favor of students from groups that are underrepresented in higher education, who, like all other students, have met the other conditions for admission, such as high grades or a good test . Those groups certainly do not include Americans of Asian descent. They are overrepresented in universities and surveys show that they are less enthusiastic about affirmative action than black or Hispanic students.
‘A formless idea of injustice’
In a country with a long, painful history of institutional racism and a long, painful history of its denial, the ruling is a landmark ruling, as were the precedents for holding that the ability to consider ethnicity in admissions was in line with with the constitution.
The last time the US Supreme Court ruled on this was in 2016, when a majority still believed that affirmative action was legal. But that was before President Donald Trump could name three conservative justices to the Court in a row. The former president therefore called the latest statement “a great day for the country”.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the ruling, endorsed an earlier ruling in which a white student successfully challenged his rejection at the University of California. At the time, four judges had advocated affirmative action as a remedy against discrimination in society. But the majority of five judges found that insufficient reason to allow discrimination on the basis of origin.
One of them wrote that it suggested a “formless idea of injustice that could go back into the past indefinitely.” That, he said, could not justify a “racial ranking that penalizes some people who bear no responsibility for whatever injustices are believed to have been suffered by those who benefit from the admissions programs” — denoting affirmative action.
“Many universities have for too long mistakenly concluded that the pillar of an individual’s identity is not the barriers they have overcome, the skills they have acquired, or the lessons they have learned, but the color of their skin,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts.
As a result, the fundamental distinction between conservative and progressive views on inequality in society has been given an unambiguous formulation in the Court’s ruling. The conservative majority does not want to know about structural discrimination against black Americans in particular – the group that is relatively least represented in higher education in states where affirmative action has already been banned and, partly because of this, also lags behind relatively sharply in income over the course of the year. their life. She only sees individual discrimination that belongs to ‘overcome barriers’, and universities are still allowed by the Court to take those qualities into account.
Stubbornly segregated
At the other end of the spectrum, progressive politicians and lobby groups point to the still substantial disadvantage of African Americans in society. “This Court,” wrote Judge Sonya Sotomayor in a dismissal of the ruling, “is building a superficial rule of color blindness into a constitutional principle in a stubbornly segregated society in which race has always played and still plays an important role.”
In a response, Barack and his wife Michelle Obama wrote that they regret the ruling. Affirmative action, the former president wrote, “has made many generations of students, including Michelle’s and mine, feel included. Michelle Obama wrote: “We often accept that money, power and privilege are fully justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids like me are expected to compete on a playing field that is far from level.
President Biden called on universities to persevere in their pursuit of diversity in their student population. “What I am proposing is a new standard, in which the Executive Board takes into account the problems that the student has overcome before reporting to the group of applicants with sufficient qualifications.” With which Biden came very close to the letter of the Court’s ruling, but was far removed from it in spirit.