This Op-Ed Originally appeared on the Washington Examiner
The Supreme Court has before it two ideal vehicles finally to end racial preferences in college admissions. For the sake of socially and economically disadvantaged minorities, the court should courageously end the practice known as affirmative action.
One case challenges Harvard’s use of race in admissions decisions. Although a private institution, Harvard receives federal funding and, therefore, is prohibited by civil rights law from discriminating on the basis of race. The other case challenges the University of North Carolina’s use of race in admissions as prohibited by civil rights law and the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
Despite the law’s clear categorical prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race, the Supreme Court has allowed it for decades. Many have explained how this judicial malfeasance has caused great harm. Perhaps no greater harm has been done, though, than that done to poor black and other minority children in America.
Because of affirmative action, those individuals and institutions who are responsible for helping pave the way to success for disadvantaged youths in this country have been able to hide from their failure to do so. That is to say, without affirmative action as a shield, serious thought and action would be employed to the root causes of why minority college applicants have needed it to gain admission to certain institutions.
No serious person denies, for example, that children need good schools with good teachers who will hold them to high academic standards. The United Negro College Fund summarizes alarming statistics from the Education Department that reflect, for example, black students are less likely to have access to college-level courses than white students, black students attend schools on average with more novice teachers than white students, and black students are less likely to be college-ready, with nearly twice as many black students than all other students in the 2015 high school graduating class meeting none of the four ACT college readiness benchmarks.
Nor can any sane person deny that living in crime-ridden communities turns children more into survivors than thrivers and potentially to value immediate gratification over long-term success. What we know is that many of the most dangerous places in the country are in minority-majority populated areas such as South Side, Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Indeed, for these children, it is not histrionic to believe tomorrow may never come.
Most important of all, children need a stable home life with a strong, involved, and intact family. Writing for the Brookings Institution before becoming treasury secretary, Janet Yellen decried the out-of-wedlock birth rate for children since 1970, claiming, “By 1990 the rate had risen to 64 percent for black infants.” Yellen went on to explain, “Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families. If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great.”
Let me be clear. There would be no perceived need for affirmative action if minority college applicants were on-the-whole equally competitive academically with their fellow nonminority college applicants. They can and should be just as well prepared, but many of them have been let down by those empowered to support them at every turn and from an early age. Affirmative action doesn’t remedy that. It only masks it.
A vote to hear the cases pending before the court and a vindication for the rule of law will strip feckless leaders in this country of the fig leaf they have long worn to hide their naked failures. No longer will they be able to hide behind their flashy admissions graphs, charts, and tables to tout their social justice bona fides. Real work will have to be accomplished to improve the lives and futures of disadvantaged minorities.
It is, in part, for these reasons that I appeal to the Supreme Court to hear these cases, finally and unequivocally ban race preferences, and then get out of the way of true progress.
Devon Westhill served as the deputy assistant secretary for civil rights at the USDA in the Trump administration.
