After Affirmative Action Rulings, Americans Are Talking

This op-ed originally appeared in RealClearEducation

In the words of President Joe Biden, the Supreme Court has “effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions.” Affirmative action is the practice, as the Court described, that took race into account when evaluating applicants, benefiting members of certain races at the expense of others. Some have praised the Court’s decision and some have denounced it, but everyone, it seems, has an opinion.

Ruth Wisse, for example, explains in an op-ed that Harvard, where she is professor emerita, is now set to have a faculty discussion on affirmative action for the first time in a quarter-century. Wisse asserts that over the past 25 years, “students had organized debates on the subject, but never the faculty, and certainly not sanctioned by the administration.”

Just prior to the decision, another opinion writer, Pamela Paul, reflected on what had changed in the affirmative action debate over the years: “the attitude toward debating controversial views.” Paul looks back to the early 1990s and laments the loss of “a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas—something academia, media and the arts still prized.” She goes on to criticize how today, “a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away.”

The affirmative action ruling seems to have broken the silence on discussing controversial issues regarding race, and not just in college admissions. Due to this increased dialogue, Americans are learning just how pervasive the consideration of race is in American life.

Columbia University Law School, for example, recently announced that it was putting on hold its decisions on who will run its prestigious legal periodicals. The school’s student services office explained that the affirmative action rulings could affect “the journal ranking process” since, presumably, race is considered among the criteria when picking the leadership.

While not directly affecting employment law, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission commissioner Andrea Lucas came out early to encourage employers to reevaluate their DEI programs in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. In an apparent reference to this line in Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, referring to “discrimination on the basis of race—often packaged as ‘affirmative action’ or ‘equity’ programs,” Lucas wrote that employers are required to provide equal opportunity, not equity. “Our mission is to prevent and eliminate discrimination, not impose ‘equitable’ outcomes,” Lucas explained.

Even commentators on professional football’s Rooney Rule, experts on U.S. scientific competitiveness, and leaders in medicine and medical education have jumped into the conversation. All are apparently motivated by the opening that the affirmative action cases created to reexamine areas where, it’s safe to assume, many Americans had no idea that race was being considered as a factor.

This is all to the good and reflects what many have asked for over the years: more honest conversations about race in America.

For too long, we have been caught in a pickle. Many in the media and on college campuses have assumed that much of the country simply believes, as they do, that the goal of racial diversity justifies racial preferences. And their control over major American institutions led them to believe that they could silence any dissenters.

On the flipside, the political Right has often overreacted by equating the wrongheaded actions taken by the Left with the racism of the 20th century. Affirmative action advocates are simply not comparable with Orval Faubus or Bull Connor.

This polarized climate has cut off honest conversation, sometimes any conversation. It has led to, among other things, silence on issues of great public importance, such as those raised tangentially in the affirmative action cases.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson observed in her dissent, for example, that “gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens.” I’m not alone in wondering to what extent the reasons for these gaps can be ascribed to historical or current racial bias, animus, or structural defects in society. Nor am I alone in speculating as to how much of these gaps can be attributed to longstanding cultural pathologies long overdue for serious attention.

We should seize this moment to examine, together, tough subjects that won’t go away by ignoring them.

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