Racial Divides Increase After Supreme Court Ruling

By Kelly Coyne and Steve Sexton
July 01, 2003

In its decision upholding affirmative action last week, the Supreme Court failed to once and for all put and end to the greatest injustice in our nation's history: the institutional discrimination against a citizen on the basis of his race. By not seizing the opportunity to end racial discrimination, the court effectively suspended the Constitution until 2028.

The pitfalls of racial preferences are many: the soft bigotry of low expectations for minorities, the preemption of merit and hard work by special preferences and quotas, divisive racial tensions, the assumption that minorities have succeeded by means other than their hard work, and the egregious deviation from the color blind society to which we must be committed.

The benefits are fewer. Racial preferences make our society feel good by increasing the existence of certain minorities in America's top schools and distinguished professions, but this is only a band-aid solution that hides but does not solve the deeper problem of failing public schools. The advocates of racial preferences also bombard us with the values of diversity, which they tell us is achievable only through meticulous social engineering and racial preferences.

We are told diversity provides educational benefits by exposing students to people with different experiences, and yet no studies have produced verifiable results to support those claims. And we are suspicious of those who claim that society has a compelling interest to seek diversity so we can learn about others, and yet do not insist on providing preferences to white applicants at the nation's historically black universities nor seek to disband the race-themed dormitories and student groups that racially segment our campus.

The concept of diversity has been switched from an outcome of bringing together many people into a professional or intellectual community, to an end in itself to be pursued by policies that admit students from the “right” minority groups who do not earn admission based on their own academic achievement. It is defended by privileged liberal elites wrought with guilt for their successes and by minority activists who are convinced that underrepresented minorities cannot succeed unless they are held to a lower standard. Both groups are misguided and perpetuate institutional discrimination in the name of diversity—a goal with educational benefits that prove dubious at best.

In the past, universities admitted their preferred races over more qualified students with fear that such policies might soon be deemed unconstitutional. Now they have been told by the Supreme Court that they can discriminate based on race, as long as they do so discreetly. A quota is not illegal when it's called “critical mass.” And systematic racial preference is permissible as long as one speaks of it in terms of “diversity factors” and “soft variables” instead of “points.”

The decision by the Supreme Court is lamentable because it does not stamp out government-condoned racism. However, what the court failed to do, voters now can. The court did not rule that race must be a consideration in admissions decisions—only that it can be. In essence, it punted the question to state legislatures. Californians have already outlawed affirmative action with the overwhelming passage of Proposition 209. Now, other states may follow our lead.

Despite the statewide ban on affirmative action, covert instances of racial preference still exist behind the closed doors of California's institutions, even at the University of California, where guilt and bigotry compel administrators to break the law to engineer desired results. The next step to ensure true equality of opportunity and to end racial discrimination of all brands is the Racial Privacy Initiative, which will soon offer California voters the chance to move to a truly race-blind society.

In 1886, the Supreme Court embraced a form of discrimination that was popular at the time, establishing “separate but equal” as the law. In 2003, the court embraced a different kind of discrimination—the one popular now. But racial preference is equally unacceptable in both instances.

When will the time come when no discrimination will be popular? When will the court embrace the letter of the law?

Kelly Coyne and Steve Sexton are the editor at large and editor in chief, respectively, of the California Patriot.