Too many Civil Rights Era gains under ATTACK in 2022 Supreme Court to revisit race-based college admissions

Here we go again. Donald Trump has been out of office for a year, and many people are very glad about that. However, the damages were done by number forty-five, and a lot of his political cronies are still impacting our nation adversely.
Look at the John Lewis Voting Rights Act being stalled in the U.S. Senate (again) last week.
Look at how so many states in the United States have Republican lawmakers who have been introducing and getting new voting laws put in place to make it very difficult for some of us to vote. Look at the fight about abortions rights. I thought we’d been there, done that years ago. (You all remember the Roe Vs. Wade court case). Today, thanks to some of these U.S. Justices that Donald Trump put in place before he lost his last presidential race, they’re trying to act like a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose what to do with her own body.
There are so many hard-fought rights that we have gained in America, that now systematically–one by one are being “reviewed” if you will, by Republicans. They are doing everything in their power to roll back some of the gains that were won during the Civil Rights movement.
The newest of attacks against gains from the past would be affirmative action in terms of our higher education and people of color getting an opportunity to go to some of the top schools in America that are predominately white schools and who before affirmative action, made it so difficult to get into those schools, you darn near had to have an “act from God, to gain admittance.
In June 2016, the Supreme Court at that time decided to race-based college admissions. In January of 2022, hmmm, there’s a move underfoot to possibly take affirmative action away as it relates to college entrance.
Monday, January 24, 2022, The Supreme Court announced that it’s going to relook at race-based college admissions. The court has agreed to hear two cases coming from lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Attorney’s for the colleges are arguing certain admissions policies aimed at increasing diversity and leveling the playing field for historically disadvantaged applicants discriminate against people of Asian American dissent, who apply at these two schools.
The two lawsuits were filed by an organization by the name “Students for Fair Admissions.” They describe themselves as an advocacy group that opposes race-based admissions policies and headed a previous lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court twice, in 2013 and 2016. Those challenges featured as a plaintiff a white student from Texas who was not admitted to the University of Texas at Austin. The court ultimately found the school’s use of race in its admissions policy constitutional.
“Students for Fair Admissions” has a new argument, so they say. Their argument that race-based admissions policies intentionally discriminate against Asian American applicants is aimed at limiting the number of Asian Americans who attend and that if race were not a factor and admissions were governed on traditional academic measures like test scores and transcripts, more Asian American students would qualify to attend.
Meanwhile, higher education policy experts, academics, and college and university administrators continue to defend the consideration of race, as part of what they describe as a “holistic” admissions policy and underscore their importance in correcting for inequity in higher education especially at schools such as Harvard and Yale, that most heavily depend on affirmative action to maintain diversity.
Truth be told, there are still a lot of institutions of higher learning that are still trying to find ways to make campuses even more accessible to Black and Hispanic students, along with low-income and other students, who are often left out. Our nation’s education doesn’t leave a level and equal opportunity playing field for all students, and that’s a fact.
While affirmative action and race-conscious admissions practices have been consistently protected by the courts, there’s a lot of speculation bussing around these days, that those legal protections may not hold for much longer. In recent rulings, judges have taken pains to note that such policies may not be needed in the future.
I don’t know what world those Justices are living in, but from where I stand, without affirmative action applied to opportunities for people of color working to gain admission at certain schools, our people will be left out in the cold so to speak.
In agreeing to hear the case, the U.S. Supreme Court has combined the lawsuits against Harvard and UNC. They have set one hour for oral arguments, which could take place as early as October 2022, setting up a decision to be announced by the summer of 2023.
Stay tuned and stay woke.