Supreme Court Denies Affirmative Action for Everyone but the Wealthy and White

By Hon. Barbara Lee

By ruling that race and ethnicity cannot be considered in college admissions, the U.S. Supreme Court sets us back more than four decades.

For generations, affirmative action has been a powerful means of lowering barriers to education for historically marginalized and underrepresented students of color. At its core, it simply aims to remedy the government-sanctioned, decades-long inequality by making race one factor in the college admissions process.

Dismantling these policies will not only have devastating implications for students of color, but for the classrooms at these institutions, which will become devoid of diversity in the lived experience and perspective needed to solve America’s toughest challenges. Higher education serves as an incubator for the brilliant ideas of tomorrow. Those ideas will now become less diverse.

I’m a graduate of Mills College, a women’s college in Oakland. There was a time when, as a Black woman, my options for higher education were limited. But because affirmative action successfully addressed the centuries-long discrimination in higher education, I was able to earn my degree while caring for my two children as a single mother on public assistance.

I met my mentor, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; received my master’s degree in social work; became a successful small business owner; serve in Congress; and ran to be only the third Black woman in our nation’s history to serve in the U.S. Senate.

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The list of barriers to higher education is already long, and I fear that with this ruling we are turning back the clock, and a generation of talented young people of color may not be given the same opportunities that I had.

For those reasons and more, I’ve fought hard to uphold affirmative action. California’s Proposition 209, which effectively banned affirmative action across our state’s public education systems, was a harmful policy that deprived countless students of color the opportunity to study at some of the greatest academic institutions in the world.

In 2020, I fought for the reversal of Prop 209, but it sadly failed. I argued against the banning of affirmative action before the UC Board of Regents years ago, and since that policy went into effect, the share of Black, Latino and Native American students has fallen significantly.

California has a difficult relationship with race. Despite being one of the most progressive states in the country, we struggle with racial inequality of epic proportions.

Ironically, [June 29] the California Reparations Task Force completed the report they were commissioned to produce. I was the only member of Congress to testify in front of the task force, and yesterday’s ruling affirms the need for their work toward an effort to repair the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and systemic racism, and for my continued effort at the federal level to establish a Commission on Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation.

While the country mourns the end of affirmative action in higher education, let’s be clear: The Supreme Court did not strike down affirmative action for everyone. It was just taken away for everyone that’s not wealthy and white.

For many wealthy white students, it still exists in the form of legacy admissions. Justice Brett Kavanaugh knows this intimately, as a legacy admission to Yale. Judge Clarence Thomas was an affirmative action admission as well. Yet, they are denying future generations their same opportunities, and making the application of a first-generation college student from an immigrant family less notable than the child of a fifth-generation Yale graduate from a wealthy family.

In the spirit of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent on the ruling, preventing the consideration of race does not end racism, and deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. We do not live in a colorblind society.

Systemic racism is not an abstract idea. For the far right, it is intentional, deliberate and strategic. Their efforts to ban books, erase history and simply deny students of color entry into the building is a coordinated effort to uphold white supremacy.

Education has always been the great equalizer, which is why, for centuries, people of color were systematically shut out of educational opportunities. [Last] Thursday’s decision is simply one more part of this effort and, ultimately, lays the groundwork to undermine Brown v. Board of Education, which began the dismantling of Jim Crow.

The remnants of Jim Crow laws and the chains of slavery were meant to be broken, not meant to take new forms. Affirmative action is a crucial tool to not only incentivize racial diversity on our college campuses, but level the playing field for all those in pursuit of the American dream.

This opinion was originally published in the Sacramento Bee on July 1.