In banning race as a factor in college admissions, the Supreme Court is merely giving new "voice" to old rationalizations for racial exclusion

A story in Business Insider speculates that Chief Justice John Roberts hasn’t become “less” conservative as some on the far-right have accused him of, but favors a more “incremental” approach to achieving the goals of the far-right court. He would have preferred, for example, not overturning Roe v. Wade just now, although he couldn’t get any of his other five cohorts to agree with him on that one.

 

But Roberts joined the rest of the far-right on his court in abolishing only “race” and no other “ism” to factor into college admissions, which puts “his” court in the same conversation with the Taney Court, which infamously ruled in the Dred Scott case that blacks had no rights a white person was “bound to respect.” As we shall see, the focus on “race” by the right is not mere semantics.

But that before let’s note who is not affected by this ruling: women, or at least not white and Asian women. Title IX and other gender quota programs—which is de facto affirmative action for mostly white women—remains untouched, and likely will be so in the future, since it affects far more than pregnant women who also vote. In a National Women’s Studies Association report entitled  Is Sisterhood Conditional? White Women and the Rollback of Affirmative Action from 1998, it was asked why are white women—who despite having benefited more from affirmative action than any group—were “silent” and “absent from the front lines” in the face of attacks on affirmative action.

The study claimed that white women were “silent” because they were more concerned about the “patriarchy” and alleged discrimination that affected them personally, and they saw themselves as greater “victims” of society despite the fact that the benefits of being white far outweigh their other complaints. 

In fact we are discovering that this “silence” was disguising something far more sinister, as Vox reported shortly after the election of Donald Trump: given free reign to voice their true opinions, white women hypocritically ignored their own affirmative action programs and became the “fiercest opponents of affirmative action” for racial minorities. Trump opened-up many a door for the free expression of hate and bigotry, and white women in this era of "MeToo" took full advantage of that opportunity.

What about Asian students, who if admissions was simply based on test scores, would benefit from the abolishing affirmative action or any criteria based on economic disadvantage. But Eric Liu pointed in TIME that “merit is not a number” and that

We all want merit to mean something, and we all may be tempted to reduce that meaning to something measurable and concrete like an SAT score. The reality, though, is that who deserves entry into an institution depends on what the institution exists to do. Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation. There are other factors to weigh than test-taking aptitude, some of them intangible.

Liu also argued that diversity is a necessity, not a “nicety,” and the current “conversation” is wrong: “It’s time to shift the debate – to ask why opportunity has gotten more scarce in America, to frame our challenge as something bigger than an every-race-for-itself zero-sum fight. Asian Americans can help lead that shift now. And that would be a great American success story.” And not only that: if it is whites who actually lose by any admission gains by Asians by the ending of affirmative action, it can only lead to complaints by whites that they are still the target of “discrimination."

And what about "affirmative action" for "legacies," or "children of alumni, donors and faculty" as noted by Politico last month; 43 percent of all admitted students at Harvard, for example, fit in this category, and most of them are white. Politico notes that this hypocritically isn't called "affirmative action," but what is called as such is a means for both "elite" schools and the Supreme Court to sidestep their own mendacity.

There is a PDF research paper that keeps popping up in my  email account  from someone named Vikash Singh of the Department of Sociology, Montclair State University in New Jersey entitled Myths of Meritocracy: Caste, Karma and the New Racism, a Comparative Study. It mainly addresses caste and racial bias in India despite laws banning it, and draws comparisons to that found in the U.S. He notes that despite the end of de facto racism as a matter of law and that

 the new racism disavows biological essence or the value of primordial ethnicity, or the residual qualities of skin color, cranium shapes, nasal index, facial angles, and so on…However, as if on cue, this granting of political rights to such others comes with a barrage of caveats against their "abuse," and a virulent discourse for the minimization of rights based on citizenship –minimum state and maximum market within the nation, borders closed. Thereby, ‘race’ connects those ghettoized in “the urban jungles throughout ‘the West’ and those marginalized in ‘the third world,’ between those situated as ‘the Underclass’ and those whose (supposed lack of) history is reduced to ‘the Primitive.’

Vikash is offering the idea that “behavioral and moral deficiency is used to justify evident abjection and discrimination” and has become “a proven ploy of assigning blame on the victim.” In a democratic “free market” society, “equality” is not necessarily for “all” people, but for people who can "profit" from it more.  Thus in a “meritocracy, within its unbounded justice, there are no limits; nothing a la nature, is too extreme –obscene power and wealth or destitution and death, it is all fair. The victorious deserves everything, the loser no charity.”

Vikash suggests that racism today is cloaked within “the notions of individual freedom and man’s inalienable rights,” and that “Neo-racism accentuates this formal equality, by explicit disavowing of ethnic references, as evident in the rhetoric of color blindness, apparent minimization of racism, and laissez faire.” All fine in theory, but in reality it is “but a shift in the criteria (or codes) of exclusion, a tactical switch with little mitigation of the intensity of social exclusion.” All things being “equal,” no one is actually “equal” and certain groups are excluded under the new “rules” that define the boundaries of "inclusion."

The idea of “meritocracy” in college admissions is but “a familiar, tested method of legitimating social injustice.”  Not all people who get the “highest” scores have the imagination of what to do with them. Exclusion based on a random sampling of “merit” based on a rigid numerical standard is just a means of going back to the “good old days” of segregation of the “separate but equal”—of "enabling and legitimating social exclusion within a broader ideology of universal (or divine) equality.”

Vikash goes on to point out that “The apparent ‘meritocracy’ of new racism then, instead of being an overcoming of past inequities seems precisely the kernel of traditional race or caste ideologies offered in its own right. The fine calibration of reward and merit –across generations –in neo-liberal policy practices is quite in accord with the extensive ledger of conduct and reward, accruing and spent over multiple life cycles, speculated by Indian metaphysicians, or Hume’s contempt for the works of the 'negroes,' who never showed 'any symptoms of ingenuity'”--thus having no "merit."

The idea that “meritocracy” is only valid as an individual “right” that only the allegedly “superior” is owed rather than what is necessary in the maintenance of a civil society, means that “merit” is identified solely on what one's race. “This myth of meritocracy is built into the conventional ideologies of race and caste, but as the disguises of skin color or religious status come unworn in our times, ‘meritocracy’ rises to the surface as but self-evident and fair excuse for social exclusion.”    

Thus we see behind that hypocritical argument that anti-affirmative action advocates only want a "color-blind" society of “true equality,” they actually use such terms to twist them into something quite different, that it is something that can be “measured” by terms dictated by those who can use it as a means of exclusion. 

The reality is that by excluding “race” as a factor in college admissions, the fact that there are far more whites that fit in the other “disadvantaged” profiles used to determine admissions, the expectation is that they will “benefit” as purely a matter of just being the dominant group. And that essentially is the whole point of this affirmative action decision of the Supreme Court.