NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I ncreasingly, a good week at the Supreme Court means a bad week for certain members of the press.
The Supreme Court ruled 6–3 Thursday that the race-based admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University are unconstitutional. The Court held that both public colleges and universities and private ones that receive federal funding — as a great many do — violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment when they consider race in admissions.
And just to be clear on the facts of the matter: Several top schools in the United States absolutely engaged in the practice of rejecting applicants, most especially Asians, based on race. This is undeniably true. No one, not even the schools, disputes this point.
Yet many in the press are taking issue with the ruling, leveling all manner of invective and accusations at the Court, including that it is illegitimate and its conservative majority racist. (This is a more popular refrain these days owing to the fact that three of the conservative justices were nominated by President Trump, the object of media loathing.) Just ignore the part where colleges did indeed engage in race-based discrimination.
“The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision is another manifestation of how conservative this court is, and how little regard it has for precedent,” complained MSNBC columnist Jessica Levinson.
On Twitter, New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie offered this largely unintelligible complaint: “As expected, the court has inverted the 14th. an amendment written explicitly to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy becomes in conservative hands an amendment that says it’s illegal to try to directly ameliorate the conditions of race hierarchy.”
“One of the things we saw today was a brilliant man — who was able to overcome centuries of institutionalized prejudice, who was able to come from the most unlikely of backgrounds with the help of a system designed to accomplish just that — turn around and pull the ladder up behind him,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who is white, complained of Justice Clarence Thomas, who is black.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that both the United States Constitution and Brown v. Board of Education require race neutrality in education. Though the Court upheld affirmative action in both 1978 and 2003, Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. . . . Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
The opinion continued, addressing specifically the pro-affirmative-action argument that there’s an inherent benefit from hosting a racially diverse (though arrived at artificially) student body.
“The interests that respondents view as compelling cannot be subjected to meaningful judicial review. Those interests include training future leaders, acquiring new knowledge based on diverse outlooks, promoting a robust marketplace of ideas, and preparing engaged and productive citizens,” the opinion reads.
It continues: “While these are commendable goals, they are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny. It is unclear how courts are supposed to measure any of these goals, or if they could, to know when they have been reached so that racial preferences can end.”
For certain members of the press, it’s irrelevant whether the Court’s decision employs sound legal reasoning consistent with the text of the Constitution. It doesn’t matter whether the decision is good law. The slogan “diversity is our strength” lost Thursday at the Supreme Court, and for those who view this mantra as a self-evident and sufficient truth, the ruling is a travesty of justice.
“Media outlets are going to rush to ask black people to react to this,” griped Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah. “Meanwhile, white women benefit the most from affirmative action and DEI policies. Y’all should also be sticking the mics and cameras in their faces.”
At MSNBC, a total meltdown.
“I fear what will happen,” fretted legal analyst Catherine Christian, who is black, during a panel appearance with fellow legal analyst Charles Coleman Jr. “Will there by many lawyers who look like Charles and I [sic] in the future? Or doctors? Or accountants? It is a problem. It is not preferential treatment.”
In Coleman’s view, “What you’re doing is you are limiting people’s access to the American Dream, and that is something that we have not really been honest about in our discussion. . . . Now we’re going to see that segregation become wider and wider.”
“We will return to elite institutions,” warned MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr., “more specifically being the space for a particular population, for predominantly white and Asian students. We will begin to see a kind of segregated higher-education landscape.”
Speaking of Asians, conspicuously absent from all the doom-and-gloom commentary and criticism of the Court is any mention of the fact that admissions offices did indeed reject applications based entirely upon the race of the applicant. Are we simply going to ignore that this is a thing that happened, and dedicate all our time and energy instead to worrying about things that might happen? Apparently! Also — and this is a sidebar that will require an article of its own — don’t lose track of which members of the press keep lumping “Asian” with “white,” as if to say the two groups are interchangeable parts of the same ethnic body. Higher education will be less ethnically diverse if we let in more Asians is certainly a unique and bold take for supposed non-racists to adopt.
After the Court delivered its opinion, the White House press pool teed up President Biden with dimwitted softball questions.
“President Biden,” asked CNN’s Arlette Saenz, “the Congressional Black Caucus said the Supreme Court has thrown into question its own legitimacy. Is this a rogue court?”
The president, who campaigned specifically on being a unifier and respecter of norms™, responded, “This is not a normal court.”
Not to be outdone by its peers in the press, the New York Times took home the gold on Thursday for the most unintentionally offensive response to the Court’s ruling, declaring in a news blurb (emphasis mine): “The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.”
It’s as if to say, “Blacks and Latinos simply can’t compete on merit against whites and Asians. You know how those people are.”
With “race-conscious” allies such as the New York Times, who even needs enemies?