Supreme Court To Decide The Fate of Affirmative Action
Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas.
Legal experts and activists say the case could lead to the end of affirmative action in higher education.
Arguments for getting rid of affirmative action assume that we live in a colorblind world, where simply declaring race-blind admissions results in equal opportunity for all applicants.
And as an article by Victor Goode at Colorlines explains, the current makeup of the Supreme Court is one that will likely agree with such an assertion.
“The arguments of the plaintiff, a white UT-Austin applicant named Abigail Fisher who was denied admission, echo the bizarrely simplistic notion articulated by Chief Justice John Roberts. ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,’ Roberts has famously declared. Of course, what he really means is to ignore history, turn a blind eye to all the social science data on widespread inequity today and pretend that we live in a colorblind world. But Roberts leads a court that observers believe will agree with him on affirmative action, at least.
In order to understand how we got to this legal crossroads, it is important to look back to the cases that preceded Fisher.”
Goode’s article take an insightful look at the history of affirmative action; from President Johnson’s 1965 speech outlining its purpose, to the decades of conservative attacks on its existence that have brought us the this major legal crossroads.
Do you support affirmative action?
Can it be saved?
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