Harvard Student Experience Case | Center for Equal Opportunity

Black patients will die struggling to find doctors, income inequality will worsen, and perhaps, the global temperature will rise from the steaming ears of affirmative action proponents. So long as people have vivid imaginations, society will continue to impose the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Reality is clear. No college applicant today was enslaved in America because of his race or lived under Jim Crow. Discrimination and racism are much less prevalent— and much more certain to be punished severely— than at affirmative action’s inception. Now was the right time to curtail the use of race in college admissions.

But enough imagination warps reality. Snapshots of incomplete facts or outright falsehoods, coupled with effective media propaganda campaigns, perpetuate the myth of minority peril. People grossly overestimate the extent to which innocent black people die at the hands of police. For example, despite walking around with personal private security, LeBron James fears getting killed by police. Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Jussie Smollet despite his conviction for staging a hate crime hoax against himself. Critical Race Theory turns “The Little Engine that Could” into “The Little Engine that Cannot” by brainwashing its followers to believe that people of color cannot advance independently.

Nowhere is the feeling of oppression most pronounced than at Harvard, as my time at Harvard Law School was filled with imaginary racial crises. Cornell West’s denial of tenure was an existential event that mobilized nearly every [Insert Identity Group] Law Student Association to sign an open letter accusing the university of systematically “devalu[ing] the scholarship of Black professors and professors of color.” The Black Law Students Association fought to silence “hate speech” so that the group’s “existence” won’t “be at odds with the university.” I can only guess what that means: after commenting against prison abolition in my criminal law class, a classmate exploded that I should not speak and that my views were not welcome during Black History Month. Every year, “folx of color” organize a “self-preservation” event to lament learning color blind case law. One of our student graduation speakers exclaimed that she was “fearful of physical and emotional harm just for existing in our three years in school.” Where did hyper-fragility come from? After all, while at Harvard Law School, students can self-segregate into their affinity groups and graduate in segregated graduation ceremonies. Imagination has no limits.

Imagined bigotry does not end with affirmative action because it pays in school and beyond. Without a false sense of emergency, universities won’t bend over backward to accept affinity groups’ radical demands. Law students regularly cash in their DNA for lucrative law firm “diversity fellowships” which pay a bonus nearly double the median income of the United States. It does not matter that admission into Harvard Law School is already a golden ticket to becoming a millionaire before age thirty, regardless of whether someone graduates with high honors or is just highly honored to graduate. Nor does it matter that many, if not most, of those admitted under affirmative action tend to already come from upper-class backgrounds or are elites from their own countries. No matter who you are, it pays to transform every mundane moment into an existential crisis.

The Supreme Court’s dose of reality isn’t enough. Harvard and UNC only outlaw the explicit use of race in the college admissions. The Court said nothing about the use of race in other contexts. Plus, as long as there is a mistaken belief that minority applicants cannot compete with white or Asian applicants, colleges will be incentivized to skirt the Supreme Court’s holding.

The battle to end affirmative action and to finally live in a society with colorblind equal opportunity cannot take place exclusively in the courtroom. It must start and end with a reality check.

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