If President Donald J. Trump succeeds in getting Neil Gorsuch confirmed as the next Supreme Court justice, the use of race as a factor in college admissions will be just “one seat away” from extinction, activist and civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton predicted Thursday.
“Affirmative action may be totally out by law, even beyond Trump’s term in office, and whoever succeeds him, because they can then say race cannot be a factor at all,” Sharpton said. “They already say it can be a factor but not the factor. They can say race cannot be a factor at all.”
And if race can no longer be considered in higher education, “that in many ways bring us to pre-1954,” Sharpton said, referring to the year of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools.
Sharpton said race-conscious affirmative action with Gorsuch “has as much chance as a snowball in a furnace.”
“Which is why you have to have a resistance movement,” Sharpton said.
Sharpton made those remarks Thursday during an editorial board meeting with Diverse.
The conversation touched on a variety of hot topics in higher education. Sharpton spoke on matters that ranged from what he sees as the next target for student activists to why there’s a need a legal remedy to the lack of diversity of faculty on campus.
