Opinion | The Repeal of Affirmative Action Is Only the Beginning - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...tion-supreme-court-repeal.html
affirmative action race diversity inequality culture policy history politics
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Let’s be honest about the painful reality: America has functioned as a full democracy — guaranteeing the franchise to all — for less than one human lifetime. In practice, our democracy is younger than me.
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During the first two decades of my life, the American people finally acknowledged this truth and, to borrow a phrase, acted affirmatively to address it
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In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
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This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.
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Those uprooting affirmative action seem content to leave intact systems that compound privilege, exacerbating inequality — like legacy admissions policies that disproportionately favor wealthy, white applicants — resulting in lower-income students and families of all races losing out.
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I find it regrettable that, over 40 years ago, Justice Lewis Powell introduced the American public to the imperative of diversity in the shallow manner that he did.
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I was a freshman in college when his seminal opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) invited some to equate the benefits of diversity with unfairness
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the idea that necessary diversity initiatives are somehow reverse discrimination or that they correlate with lower standards or lesser outcomes.
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The data suggests exactly the opposite. Study after study demonstrates that, across organizations, diversity enhances critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as well as productivity, profitability and performance.
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we should tell the truth about why diversity is now controversial: Opponents of diversity are opponents of any racial consciousness. They want to prevent us from understanding the ways that the past informs the present, from wrestling with the fullness and richness and complexity of our history.