The conservative fringe of the United States Supreme Court continues to unravel decades of progressive gains. After stripping women of the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, now a majority of six conservative judges have put an end to affirmative action in the university admissions process, sweeping under the rug one of the symbols of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.
The ruling came after decades of vigorous debate over admissions practices that include affirmative action — taking ethnicity into account when considering a prospective candidate’s case. In this case, Harvard University (private) and the University of North Carolina (public) were sued by the American organization Students for Fair Admissions, which argued that affirmative action practices disadvantaged students of Asian origin. near-perfect school performance; the excellence of their records was no longer enough to hoist them among the selected candidates — in 2022, Harvard admitted 2,000 candidates drawn from a batch of 60,000. reverse racism.
One cannot ignore the terrible irony here: in the name of the discrimination experienced by an ethnic group, the court abolishes a regime precisely put in place to try to make up for a reign of complete exclusion of blacks, for example, on university campuses. Affirmative action has immense historical symbolism in the United States, as it was put in place to establish a standard of equal opportunity following a tragic reign of particularly odious racial segregation in certain universities.
Poorly implemented, the practice is shocking and gives rise to mistakes, as we saw in our country when a competition from Laval University for positions in research chairs excluding white men turned into controversy. Similarly, the idea of quotas — sometimes rejected by the American Supreme Court — is excessive. But the spirit of the policies ofaffirmative action, which aims to achieve greater diversity on campuses, and by extension in society, has always been considered legitimate. Until last Thursday.
Under the pen of Chief Justice John Roberts, the highest court has ruled that affirmative action by universities violates the equal protection clause of the 14e amendment of the Constitution. “Many universities, for far too long, have erroneously concluded that the bedrock of a person’s identity is not the challenges they have overcome, the skills they have developed, or the lessons they have learned. she learned, but the color of her skin. The constitutional history of our country does not condone this choice,” wrote the Chief Justice.
In a dissenting opinion by the three progressive justices, magistrate Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the majority were delusional in imagining “that racial inequality was the problem of another generation while racial inequality remains a reality Today “. We subscribe to this reading.
The story here offers quite a twist that stirs and worries: policies put in place to counter real phenomena of discrimination in admission based on skin color are defeated, on a fallacious motive – with all due respect to the court — or the faulty impression that racial inequalities do not exist and do not penalize, at the entrance to university and in employment of course, ethnic groups more than others. It’s true that affirmative action practices haven’t explosively increased the percentages of students from the Black and Hispanic communities over the years, but that’s all the more reason not to stop those efforts. and risk weakening small gains.
Admissions to the faculties of major universities translate into political and professional positions; graduates from racialized communities will be fewer in number if entry to university is complicated for them. The Supreme Court ruling will affect the composition of American society, and it opens the door to lower equal opportunity standards at a time when there are no signs that discrimination is eradicated, well opposite.
American universities will be able to fall back on an opening that the Court has granted, namely to take into consideration the personal experience of a candidate when analyzing his file. They promise that they will comply with the law, as Harvard and UNC have announced, and affirm that they will be creative to maintain criteria guaranteeing better equal opportunities. Beware of those who dare to defy the spirit of this new destructive judgment: it’s a safe bet that they will find themselves in a court of law.