The Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina was both shocking and completely expected. As a Harvard graduate and college professor, I have some thoughts to share.
First of all, it should be clear that the U.S. Supreme Court is an illegitimate, corrupt and morally bankrupt body. Its conservative members are unelected MAGA politicians who enjoy gifts from white supremacist billionaire benefactors, and we should consider employing civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to these unjust decisions, or simply ignore what these appointed partisan legislators in robes have to say.
The white nationalist majority on the high court is gaslighting us, as they proclaim racism is over, the nation is colorblind, and there is nothing to see here. And it is quite rich for a white nationalist majority of jurists to announce color blindness in a white supremacist society.
Chief Justice John Roberts, a moderate and genteel white nationalist with manners and a smile, similarly announced the end of racism when he gutted the Voting Rights Act a decade earlier in Shelby County v. Holder.
It is no accident that Edward Blum, the man who led the litigation effort to destroy voting rights, was also behind the effort to end affirmative action. Both projects are interrelated. Blum, we see what you did there. White supremacy views Black progress as a zero-sum game. Anything that Black people, people of color and marginalized groups achieve are at the expense of white people. This is what I call Great Replacement Theory jurisprudence, the notion that the court system must uphold the power of white people, who are viewed as an endangered species with a declining birth rate and an emerging numerical minority. Already, the majority of American children today are children of color, which alarms white nationalists. Either you ease into this new reality and celebrate diversity, equity and inclusion, or you rig the game to maintain white supremacy.
Affirmative action never was about providing college admissions or jobs to unqualified people. And the United States of America never operated based on merit. “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic,” Martin Luther King said. “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, predominantly white colleges and universities began admitting substantial numbers of Black folks for the first time. Before that time, only a handful had been admitted, if at all. Qualified Black people always existed and always excelled. However, many doors were closed. But things changed during the Civil Rights movement, when Black leaders were assassinated and the urban uprisings against racism, police violence and poverty threatened to burn the whole thing down – not unlike the George Floyd protests of 2020 and current events in France today.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a hypocrite who relied on white patronage to become a very useful tool in the dismantlement of civil rights, was a beneficiary of affirmative action. However, Uncle Clarence took the wrong lessons from that experience, and now all of us must deal with the consequences of one Black man’s self-hatred, low self-esteem and concerns over how white people perceive him.
I benefited from affirmative action, and I do not care about how people perceive my qualifications and merit. As a Black man, I had to work twice as hard to get half as much, and white society always assumes Black is inferior and non-deserving. Like Thomas, the late Justice Antonin Scalia – an evil man who died doing what he loved, being in the presence of his wealthy donors – was a proponent of mismatch theory, a notion that these elite universities are admitting all these unqualified and unprepared Black and Latinx students, and it is simply too much for them to handle. The elephant in the room is the discourse around affirmative action, guided by the unspoken belief in Black intellectual inferiority.
Since I was a child, from my journey to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Oxford – and as a grown man who has seen and done many things and is now a college professor at Rutgers and a journalist – people have told me to my face I was unqualified, incompetent and mediocre, that I lacked analytical skills, leadership skills and did not have what it takes. The countless personal affronts, assaults, attacks and harassment were daily reminders from white people that I did not belong in these spaces. And yet, I am not special, as most Black people have their own stories to tell. These experiences either crush you or make you stronger.
Getting back to the Supreme Court case, there are some realities that expose the contradictions in the affirmative action debate. For example, the opposition to affirmative action by the whip cracking white nationalist Supreme Court has nothing to do with merit but rather white privilege. No mention was made of legacy admissions. At Harvard, 43% of the white students admitted are recruited athletes, children of faculty and staff, children of donors and legacy students whose relatives are Harvard graduates. Nearly 70% of legacy applicants are white, and three-quarters of white students admitted under one of these special categories would have been rejected otherwise.
In addition, some Asian Americans allowed themselves to become a wedge in people of color solidarity and serve the interests of white supremacy by claiming they were not admitted to Harvard due to Black and brown affirmative action students. As these “model minority” members will soon learn, white supremacy cares everything about white students and little-to-nothing about the Asian American community, and the end of affirmative action will hurt their children as well.
Another contradiction is that the Supreme Court excluded military academies from its ruling, presumably because diversity is a national security priority, or perhaps because the army needs as many Black and brown bodies as it can find to kill Black and brown people abroad.
Finally, the end of affirmative action is part of the whip cracking white nationalists’ clarion call. This decision, along with the other rulings by this corrupt court on abortion, student loans and LGBTQ+ rights, is part of the destruction of any hopes for a government guided by civil and human rights.
In the meantime, they are coming for the Fourteenth Amendment. We must fight for our rights, support HBCUs and demand an increased Black and brown presence in predominantly white institutions or PWIs.
This is the White Nationalist’s last stand. Whether we remain a colonial settler state or become a multiracial democracy is in our hands. The birth comes after the labor pains.