It's about more than Affirmative Action

Today's SCOTUS ruling is the payoff for white wealthy families who invested in decades-long efforts to end racially reparative laws. We must stop them.

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court finally dropped the gavel on Affirmative Action practices in higher education admissions. You’ve probably read all you need to on that story, so I’ll tell a different version of it.

I am starting with a Texas white woman named Abigail Fisher.

When Fisher got the letter rejecting her admission to the top university in Texas, she knew it was because she was white.

"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 recounted in a YouTube video.

According to a ProPublica report, there were probably other factors at play.

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.

Facts aside, Fisher was in luck.

When she learned she didn't get into the University of Texas at Austin, she asked her father, "Hey, can we call Edward?"

She was referring to Edward Blum, a friend of her father who had been searching for a sympathetic white applicant for three years to feature in an NAACP-like lawsuit to prove reverse racism.

Blum was a lifelong legal adversary of laws meant to repair harms done to historically marginalized Americans and protect racial minorities from ongoing systemic abuses. He self-reports in multiple media profiles that he was once a "college liberal." He started reading Commentary magazine, and whoolah! Became a neoconservative. 

To shield himself from criticism for holding animus aimed toward racial minorities, Blum says his family experienced anti-Semitism during the 1950s and 60s. His father wasn't allowed to be in some hotels, and his synagogue received bomb threats. Yet, in both those examples, it wasn't competitive Blacks and Latinos applicants trying to enter Harvard that was the threat. White supremacists who hated the idea of minorities having the opportunities whites enjoyed were the obstacle.

Why hasn't he spent his life fighting that problem? Is it just a veil to cover are more obvious part of his villain origin story?

In 1992, he ran for Congress and lost. He blamed gerrymandering that favored minority candidates. He sued, and in 1996 the Supreme Court ruled in his favor.

That victory led him to file copycat suits in other states and a broader agenda.

In 2013 he had notched up a huge win with Shelby County v. Holder, a case that gutted a portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That case ended "pre-clearance," basically a legal name for the federal authority to scrutinize states and their voting procedures, watching them so they aren't disproportionately burdening racial minorities.

Money Changes Everything

A 2017 New York Times profile of Blume calls him "a one-man legal factory with a growing record of finding plaintiffs who match his causes, winning big victories, and trying above all to erase racial preferences from American life."

That's a big promo for a financial analyst with no legal background. So, can he afford to hire production companies to make glossy videos for clients like Fisher and retain Washington attornies with the skills to argue cases in the most prominent court? How does a guy in Nowhere, Maine, get watershed anti-diversity cases onto the SCOTUS docket?

Just as it was convenient that Fisher had a connection to Blum that escalated her disappointment with a university admissions decision to the level of a national scandal, so too had Blum benefited from connections to amplify his hatred for racial reparative laws.

The NYT says:

He is a matchmaker bringing together two forces: students and others who believe they are being mistreated in the name of racial justice, and conservative donors who finance his work and that of the high-powered, establishment Republican lawyers who take the cases to court.

[…]

The 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.

The wellspring of dollars that Blum draws from runs deep and wide, connecting a vast network of think tanks on a mission to weaken the government and make America safe for wealthy white families.

One of his funders, the Searle Freedom Trust, is named for Dan Searle. He has funded the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute, Pacific Research Institute, the Federalist Society, and many other ultra-conservative policy mills.

A report in 2013 by The Guardian, The Texas Observer, and the Portland Press Herald published proposals from 40 state organizations that sought funding from Searle Freedom Trust, Blum's funder, to launch a nationwide attack on education, healthcare, and tax collections.

If you want to see the proposals from each conservative organization by state, you can read them here. Notably, the published proposals were sent to the State Policy Network, a Searle grantee, by Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorialist who was also a consultant to wealthy families.

It appears that the metastasizing movement to engage Americans in interracial squabbling, divisive minority scapegoating, and mass suspicion of the institutions that serve our common interests is a planned event.

A Convenient Minority

The case hinging on the sympathetic white girl denied university admission was a bust. Even though Blum argues Affirmative Action "treats whites unfairly," the SCOTUS rejected Fisher's challenge to diversity policies at the University of Texas. Blum would need to find a more impregnable plaintiff with better qualifications.

Enter Asians (and some other immigrants).

Students for Fair Admissions, Blum's front group acting as the plaintiff that won today's SCOTUS rebuke of race-conscious admissions policies, claimed that Asian students were the real victims. This was an impressive ploy. 

I won't go too far into this because it's messy, but pitting the model minority against undeserving blacks is a good wedge.

The sense that Asian American students are hard-working, high-achieving young people from families and a monolithic culture that values education more than other racial minority groups is a settled narrative. If blacks and Latinos claim fewer of their students are selected due to historic systemic racism, the rebuttal is, "What about Asians?"

If racism is such an issue, why are Asians ove

See:

Asian culture, good. Black culture, bad. Got it.

Listen, we must stop pretending that Asians and other racial minorities are interchangeable groups. Just as Native Americans and blacks have different unique claims against the U.S. that require special remedies, so it is in this case too. I get the drive for universal, all lives matter views that say they’re based on the Constitution, but let’s not be obtuse. Our history has called us to create special reparative solutions for the abuse of distinct populations that would not be well-served by treating people in internment camps the same as those who put them in those camps.

Then again, America is a country where it made sense to give reparations to enslavers while denying compensation to the enslaved.

Three final things on this:

First, “Asian” includes groups with different cultures and very different life outcomes.

Second, the boom of Asian populations is a relatively new phenomenon, and those who have come since 1990 were increasingly educated before arriving here.

See:

And third, Asian Americans have nuanced views about Affirmative Action, with most who have heard of it saying that it’s a good thing. Many Asian American groups have been vocal in their refusal to be used as pawns for conservatives to wield against others.

So, while the Asian angle has been the perfect wedge issue in the short term, I don’t expect it will last forever.

That doesn’t mean we should rest, though. A story in politico tells us the attack on Affirmative Action is a precursor to other fights.

Why Ending Affirmative Action Is Shortsighted

There are something like 400 languages spoken in American public schools. Our communities boast of foods, music, and cultural expressions from all over the world. Religions? We’ve got them all. Diversity is our norm, and the idea of a single way to be American is un-American.

While conservatives invest heavily in reconstructing a homogenous and whitewashed American ideal created solely in their image and for their continual advantage, the rest of us, the growing majority, have to work toward innovating our common systems so they can effectively negotiate differences and promote the common good. It’s not a nice to have. It’s imperative. Our peace depends on it. There is no future in constantly disabling our institutions from finding ways to accommodate all the shapes and sizes of our humanity.

I can’t think of a place that should be better at creating representative cohorts of Americans who live and learn together than colleges and universities. Instead of casting them as places of zero-sum competition for supposedly scarce learning opportunities, we should consider them as democratic engines that produce citizens who can lead the world in coexistence, community, and common ground.

I’m not naive. I know we have more time ahead to see late-stage white supremacy gasp for its final inhale. But, on the other side of that perishing, there is a great country to be had.

Ours.