Monday’s Supreme Court decision allowing renewed
affirmative action in higher education has produced more questions
than answers. What percentage of one’s heritage must be
minority to qualify for racial preferences? How will
government-sanctioned racial discrimination cure the problem of
racial inequality? Can someone define the term “critical
mass” without using circular reasoning? And will racial
preferences ever end?
In two conflicting rulings, the Supreme Court announced Monday
that it would effectively uphold the use of racial discrimination
in college admissions, so long as universities weren’t too
obvious when doing so. The court not only worsened the problem of
racial preferences, but it rewrote the Constitution in the
process.
Judging a case against the University of Michigan, the High
Court ruled that the university’s undergraduate admission
system was too much like the practice of maintaining racial quotas
and was therefore unconstitutional. On the other hand, the court
upheld the university’s law school’s use of race in
admissions because it uses the term “critical mass”
instead of “quota.”
Essentially, administrators chose a target number of favored
minority students, called a “critical mass,” and
admitted minority applicants to achieve a goal.
Based on this, the court decided schools may not openly use
racially discriminatory methods, but they may use subjective and
ambiguous methods to take race into account. During Supreme Court
testimony, representatives for the University of Michigan could not
even define how a “critical mass” differed from a quota
““ for very good reason.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion of
the Court, stating that “In summary, the Equal Protection
Clause (of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) does not
prohibit the (University of Michigan) Law School’s narrowly
tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a
compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow
from a diverse student body.”
Up until Monday, affirmative action was only allowed as a
temporary violation of the Constitution to remedy past racial
discrimination. Now that O’Connor has justified the
suspension of constitutional rights based on the never-ending cause
of creating racial diversity, there will be no stop to racial
discrimination by the government for as long as the ruling
stands.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist was critical of
O’Connor’s ruling. “The (University of Michigan)
Law School has managed its admissions program, not to achieve a
critical mass but to extend offers of admission to members of
selected minority groups in proportion to their statistical
representation in the applicant pool. But this is precisely the
type of racial balancing that the Court itself calls patently
unconstitutional. … Here the means actually used are forbidden by
the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.”
Rehnquist’s assessment is exactly correct. To reach their
decision, the majority of the justices had to overlook years of
precedent as well as common sense.
By allowing discrimination to take place whenever an
administrator wishes, the Supreme Court has left individuals’
constitutional rights unprotected in the hands of unaccountable
officials. This action has undone years of progress toward the
color-blind society Martin Luther King Jr. pushed and the
Constitution established. Because of this, the American people and
government will have to address the issue of race more now than
ever before.
All today’s university applicants can do is pray that by
the time their children are of college age their skin color will
not be held against them. Like King before me, that is my dream,
too.
Maddox is from Texas A&M.