WI: supreme court strikes down affirmative action

What if in the 1978 California V. Bakke supreme court case, the supreme court had ruled that race could not be considered a factor in college admissions policy? How would the left react? How would the right react? Will liberals be as outraged over this ruling as conservatives were outraged over Roe V. Wade?
 

GarethC

Donor
Proponents will rebadge affirmative action programmes as regionally-targetted economic-deprivation-action programmes, where the qualifying criteria are poverty and locale rather than ethnicity. Then you'll get - I hesitate to use the word "token", but there you go - token white students from inner city areas being allowed in on those programmes, to justify the non-racial basis for the criteria, while still mostly focusing on delivering education for black Americans.
 
Time to get rid of it

I believe we are past the point of race riots and such over it, and honestly it is quickly becoming a joke due to interracial marriage and immigration. For example, my brother, my sister, and I all married different races from ourselves. My sister married a Pakistani (immigrant), I married a Southeast Asian (immigrant), and my brother married a Vincentian (born in the US, black Caribbean ethnically).

Because of the racist underpinnings of affirmative action, being Pakistani or South East Asian won't help you get hired or admitted into a school, but being black will. In the situation with my own family it makes no sense on two points: First, all of the children from these marriages are not really Pakistani, European, South East Asian, or Vincentian...they are all biracial. So, to hire the progeny of my brother in a preferential matter really does not make sense, simply because they technically do not meet the criteria of being non-white (because the children are half European). Second, the children of the purely American couple (my brother) will have preference based upon how they look, while my sister's and my own children, who have parents from third world countries (heck, my wife grew up literally starving sometimes) are considered "privileged" under what racist criteria I do not know.

Then we have the issue of Hispanics, which is a real interesting one. Being "Hispanic" isn't really a race any more than being "American." There are white Hispanics, black Hispanics, Indio Hispanics, biracial Hispanics, even Indian and Asian Hispanics. They have the same racial diversity as Americans. Yet, for affirmative action purposes they are given higher preference than Indians and South East Asians, many of which have much darker complexions than most Hispanics other than black and Indian Hispanics. So, why is one ethnic origin and lingual group situated in Latin America given preference over those in Asia, many of which in the last 50 years experienced profound genocides and poverty? It's not like the Latin Americans had it worse!

I think anyone who in the year 2015, witnessing affirmative action and not realizing how inconsistent and racist it has become is on a different planet. Heck, colleges are denying students simply for being Asian while Asians look for ways to hide their race to work around it. This alone is enough reason to can the policy entirely.

So, in about 13 years we will be 50 years removed from the OP's supreme court decision. America is no longer a mostly white and the rest are black sort of country. Honestly, it never really was. In the year 2028, much more than 10 percent of all marriages will be interracial, 15% of the country will be immigrants. Race will be such a vague notion in so many cases, it turns affirmative action into a relic of a past which bares no semblance to the present reality.
 
Proponents will rebadge affirmative action programmes as regionally-targetted economic-deprivation-action programmes, where the qualifying criteria are poverty and locale rather than ethnicity. Then you'll get - I hesitate to use the word "token", but there you go - token white students from inner city areas being allowed in on those programmes, to justify the non-racial basis for the criteria, while still mostly focusing on delivering education for black Americans.

What's wrong with the "tokens?" If Affirmative Action exists, it should be based squarely upon socioeconomic status and be overt wealth redistribution. At least the program would not be literally racist.
 
Sorry. I'm not buying into 'America is a post-racial society' kind of thing. The statistics tell a different story. As do the blacks being shot by police.
 
Sorry. I'm not buying into 'America is a post-racial society' kind of thing. The statistics tell a different story. As do the blacks being shot by police.

No one said that America is post-racial. Rather, the racial dynamics of the US are much more diverse than what affirmative action can accommodate.

Further, the murder of men from certain police officers is not necessarily the same issue as companies or schools needing an "extra incentive" to hire blacks and hispanics. Essentially, you would be accusing huge institutions of having mal-intent when it pertains to racial matters based upon the actions of individuals that do not reflect larger institutions.
 
I would favor a system where people are given help to get into college based entirely on economics, except for the fact that some schools might focus heavily on recruiting poor white students while discriminating against poor black students.
 
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