The
United States Supreme Court decided in a 6-2 decision to uphold a Michigan amendment
to their constitution banning the use of racial preferences in college
admissions.
With the majority of the
Supreme Court consisting of justices having either served in the Reagan
Administration or holding extremely partisan Republican views, it was not
surprising. Affirmative action and
voting rights laws have been decimated in the United States of America by these
justices with lifelong appointments to the Highest Court.
Reagan’s
record on civil rights was abysmal and appalling to civil rights advocates, but
admired and fostered by states’ rights advocates.
Supported Bob Jones Univ.’s miscegeny policy, inadvertently.
The president was so cut off from the
counsel of black Americans that he sometimes did not even realize when he was
offending them. One example occurred when Reagan sided with Bob Jones
University in a lawsuit to obtain federal tax exemptions that had been denied
by the IRS. The IRS denied tax
exemptions to segregated private schools. Many of them were schools such as Bob
Jones University, which enrolled a handful of minority students but prohibited
interracial dating and marriage. It was the basis of this discrimination that
the IRS denied the tax exemption.
Source: The Role of a
Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p.521-22 , Jul 2, 1991
Reagan never supported the use of federal
power to provide blacks with civil rights. He opposed the landmark Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Reagan said in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been
“humiliating to the South.” While he made political points with white
southerners on this issue, he was sensitive to any suggestion that his stands
on civil rights issues were politically or racially motivated, and he typically
reacted to such criticisms as attacks on his personal integrity.
Source: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou
Cannon, p. 520 , Jul 2, 1991
Yep,
that was good old Reagan. Reagan fought
to overturn the Voting Rights and Affirmative Action. Back in March of 1988, George E. Curry wrote
in the Chicago Tribune:
WASHINGTON — President Reagan, setting
the stage for a showdown with Congress on civil rights, Wednesday vetoed a bill
that would restore federal protections for minority groups, women, the elderly
and the physically disabled.
It had been anticipated that Reagan would
veto the Civil Rights Restoration Act even though it had been passed by wide
margins in the House and Senate. The President said the act would ``vastly and
unjustifiably extend the power of the federal government over the decisions and
affairs of private organizations.
The act affects any business or
institution that accepts federal funds in its operations.
Tuesday’s
decision by 6 uber-conservative state’s rights advocates returns our country to
a time when higher education is reserved for the wealthy, privileged children
of the powerful. These justices have
been completing the Reagan dream.
In June 2013 the
Roberts Court decimated the voting rights act.
According to the Washington Post:
A
divided Supreme
Court on Tuesday invalidated a crucial component of the landmark Voting
Rights Act of 1965, ruling that Congress has
not taken into account the nation’s racial progress when singling out certain
states for federal oversight.
The
vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other
conservative members of the court in the majority.
The Reagan
legacy of states’ rights lives on. And,
what was the result of the misguided ruling by 5 men to overturn years of hard
fought civil rights legislation?
Within 24 hours of the Supreme Court’s
decision to
strike down the law requiring nine states to submit voting law changes
to the federal government for pre-clearance, five* are already moving
ahead with voter ID laws, some of which had already been rejected as
discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act.
The spate of new and potentially
discriminatory laws is exactly why proponents of the Voting Rights Act argued
that Section 4, the pre-clearance requirement, should remain in place.
Before
1965, when the law was first passed, state and local governments came up with
ever-inventive ways to keep blacks from voting, forcing the federal government
to launch countless legal battles. When Texas was prohibited from
holding all-white primaries in 1927, for example, it passed a new law to allow
the party leadership to decide who could vote. They chose an all-white primary.
“Early attempts to cope with this vile
infection resembled battling the Hydra,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her
fierce dissent of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Whenever one form of voting
discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.
This Court repeatedly encountered the remarkable ‘variety and persistence’ of
laws disenfranchising minority citizens,” she continued.
Joseph
Stalin said ‘It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count
the votes”. Stalin would be jealous of
the GOP. It’s not only who counts the
votes, it’s who is allowed to vote and who chooses the candidates on the
ballot.
History of
Affirmative Action
The NationalCouncil on State Legislatures April 7, 2014 article writes:
Excerpt:
Affirmative
action policies initially focused on improving opportunities for African
Americans in employment and education. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board
of Education decision in 1954 outlawing school segregation and the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 improved life prospects for African Americans. In 1965, however,
only five percent of undergraduate students, one percent of law students, and
two percent of medical students in the country were African American. President
Lyndon Johnson, an advocate for affirmative action, signed an Executive Order in
1965 that required government contractors to use affirmative action policies in
their hiring to increase the number of minority employees.
President Lyndon
Johnson said in 1965, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been
hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race
and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just
believe that you have been completely fair."
The
reasoning of the majority in upholding Michigan’s constitutional amendment to
ban affirmative action is really interesting:
Kennedy
stressed that the case was not about the constitutionality or merits of the
race-conscious admissions policies of colleges and universities, but instead hinged on whether voters in the
state may choose to prohibit consideration of such preferences.
Opponents of
affirmative action claim that
affirmative action amplifies racial prejudice and that affirmative action
programs are condescending to minorities because it is implied that these
groups need affirmative action in order to succeed in higher education.
So, one may
deduce that the Supreme Court really leveled the playing field by doing
minorities a favor. Oh, contraire. According to Business Insider:
Legacies Still Get a Staggeringly Unfair College Admissions
Advantage
Legacy
admissions — giving children of alumni preference in the admissions process —
has a long history in American higher education. Kids often follow their
parents to the same school, frequently applying with the hope that they'll get
a favorable look.
How
much of a boost do they get? A 2011
study of 30 elite institutions found that the children of
undergraduate alumni ("primary legacies") were, on average, 45.1% more likely to get in.
An earlier
study by Princeton's Thomas Espenshade found that the legacy advantage
was equivalent to a 160-point swing on an SAT score.
That's
not a tiebreaker between equally qualified applicants; it's a massive
advantage. That's particularly clear at the Ivies:
Harvard's
legacy admissions rate hovers
around 30%.
For
Princeton's class of 2015, 33%
of legacy applicants were admitted.
Yale
says it admits 20
to 25% of legacy applicants.
Keep
in mind, those legacy admissions rates are self-reported.
Yes, keep in
mind, those legacy admissions are self-reported. You might say, but those are
the Ivies, the Michigan is a public university.
Selective
public universities, including the
University of Michigan and the
University of Virginia favor legacies as well.
There's
some evidence that the practice has declined. The proportion of legacy admissions is
lower than it used to be. In 1958, the legacy admissions rate was 70%.
Now, that’s
interesting. The proportion of legacy
admissions is lower than it used to be.
Do y0u suppose that’s due to affirmative action?
Legacy
applicants tend to be
white and wealthy. Legacy admissions therefore contribute to the rich
kid problem at elite schools. Underrepresented minorities make
up about 12.5% of the applicant pool at selective schools. They make
up only 6.7% of the legacy pool.
So
6 members of the Roberts’ court have ruled that wealth and privilege not
diversity will be the determining factor in college admissions. Maybe the U.S. will get back to the 1958
legacy admission rate of 70% for the rich and powerful.
By Patricia
Baeten
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