Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a voter-approved Michigan law that bans affirmative action in the college admissions process. On a 6-2 vote in Schuette v. BAMN, the Supreme Court reversed the opinion of the Sixth Circuit Court that struck down the law.
Over the weekend, I took some time to read all of the opinions from the case. Aside from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor judicious and forthright 58-page dissent, I felt like I was reading scripts from the theater of the absurd.
I have listed below what I consider the six most absurd statements from the opinions.
No.1: Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. “The electorate’s instruction to governmental entities not to embark upon the course of race-defined and race-based preferences was adopted, we must assume, because the voters deemed a preference system to be unwise, on account of what voters may deem its latent potential to become itself a source of the very resentments and hostilities based on race that this Nation seeks to put behind it.”
Justice Kennedy’s assumption is not only wrong, but ridiculous. Michigan voters deemed a preference system to be very wise, but only when all the racial preferences benefit White students. The current system — the tragically unequal K-12 system, all of the major admission factors from GPAs, to standardized tests, to performance of college preparatory courses — benefits students from wealthy families attending majority White schools and therefore gives race-based preferences to White applicants.
No. 2: Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”
No one is falling for this silliness. Justice Kennedy knows whomever the court empowers to resolve the debate about affirmative action will determine how the debate is resolved. Justice Kennedy knows what different groups would do. He knows if the court empowers White Michigan voters to resolve the debate — as the U.S. Supreme Court has — then affirmative action will be disallowed. He knows if the court empowers college officials, progressive Americans of all races, African-Americans or Latinos to resolve the debate, then affirmative action will be allowed.
