Leftist university administrators are desperately awaiting the Supreme Court’s decisions in the cases Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, which most court watchers predict will end legal affirmative action in America. The decisions are expected to be released in June.
These administrators are in this state of worried anticipation because they are dedicated to judging the students who apply to them under the categories of “Asian candidates,” “white candidates,” “black candidates,” “Hispanic candidates,” “Native American candidates,” “Pacific Islander candidates.” And, as was revealed in the Harvard case, they are dedicated to using separate admissions standards for each “race.” For example, an Asian applicant to Harvard in the fourth-highest decile of academic achievement among applicants has a 4 percent chance of being admitted, while an African American candidate in the same decile has a 41.1 percent chance of being admitted.
This reveals quite clearly the reinforcement of the false idea that each person belongs to and is defined by belonging to a certain racial type of Homo sapiens.
Race is not a biological reality. Persons have ancestry from particular regions and thus share some genetic similarities with people who also have ancestry from those regions, but there is no demarcating line that genetically separates people into distinct groups. Moreover, the race terms used by the US government to categorize people do not remotely approximate genetic reality. For instance, some people of European descent actually have greater genetic similarity to people who have Asian ancestry than with some other Europeans. And the “Asian” racial classification includes nearly 60 percent of the world, including people whose ancestors came from places as diverse as Japan, Nepal, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Armenia, and China.
The Left often correctly notes that Americans’ conception of race as something that separates people into black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander is not true. In 2021, for example, health equity researcher Paula Braveman of the University of California, San Francisco, and Tyan Parker Dominguez, a health care systems expert at the University of Southern California, published an essay in which they argued that we should abandon the use of the term race and substitute it with the phrase ethnic group to better reflect the biological reality. They noted that the concept of ethnicity better evokes the social characteristics that persons share, such as history and language.
That’s not a bad idea. Identifying people by and categorizing them based on “race” reinforces the false idea that people fall into one of six different types of humans. Of course, people’s ethnic history and ancestry are an important part of who they are, but our similarities as humans far eclipse genetic differences between ancestral groups; those genetic differences have not been scientifically shown to result in different group outcomes.
While many on the left criticize the “racialization” of our society, when it comes to action, they love to define people by “race.” And they choose who can and cannot attend their schools based on this artificial typification.
Affirmative action has morphed into a beast of all-encompassing obsession with “race.”
Judge Emilio M. Garza, formerly of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was one of the first jurists to use the biological unreality of race as an argument against affirmative action. In his concurring decision in the 2011 case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, he wrote: “The idea of dividing people along racial lines is artificial and antiquated. Human beings are not divisible biologically into any set number of races. A world war was fought over such principles. Each individual is unique. And yet, in 2010, governmental decisionmakers are still fixated on dividing people into white, black, Hispanic, and other arbitrary subdivisions.”
Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito picked up on this point when he noted during oral arguments in the Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina case that it was “arbitrary” to consider an applicant from Afghanistan and an applicant from China under the same category.
In defending against such arguments, some on the left have contended that the nonexistence of biological races does not negate affirmative action’s role in remedying past racism against certain groups.
For instance, Joseph L. Graves Jr., an “antiracist” scholar, argued in 2015 that the scientific fact that there are not really biological races has “nothing to do with the ongoing racial discrimination faced by persons with dark skins in the United States.” In direct response to Judge Garza’s statement, Graves wrote, “[T]he past-discrimination that the University of Texas (and other affirmative action) plans attempts to redress are based on how socially defined races suffered past and are suffering ongoing discrimination in American society.”
Remedying past discrimination was the original purpose of affirmative action policies. Post–Jim Crow, well-meaning university administrators wanted to give African American students opportunities that they would not have otherwise had because of the discrimination waged against them and their families.
Now, however, affirmative action has morphed into a beast of all-encompassing obsession with “race” — it is picking and choosing people based on the lie that everyone falls into a certain “type” of Homo sapiens that is determinative of who they are.
University administrators and their allies no longer use the arguments that Graves used. They now argue that affirmative action is necessary because it creates a “diversity” that they say confers educational benefits. For example, in oral arguments in the Harvard case, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that ending affirmative action would deny students “the benefits of learning in a diverse educational environment.”
That’s partially because the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978 that race cannot be used to remedy past discrimination of racial groups. But it’s also a reflection of the Left’s shifting goals when it comes to affirmative action. It’s no longer about remedying past discrimination — it’s about creating a community with their idealized proportion of “races.” Having more of their preferred “races,” the Left argues, necessarily creates a better environment.
For example, in a 2022 article in the Scientific American, Stacy Farina, a biology professor at Howard University, and K Amacker, a PhD student at Howard University, wrote that affirmative action “aligns with” scientists’ goals of “improving both the numbers and the success of racial and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in STEM programs, including Black, Latine, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students.”
In addition, activists express dismay that the number of students from their favorite “types” of humans will likely decline post–affirmative action.
Cara McClellan, an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund, demonstrated this concern in an interview with NBC News, worrying, “The end of holistic admissions would lead to a severe reduction in the number of Black and Latino students at Harvard.” Similarly, Bloomberg gave an essay the headline “Affirmative Action’s End Will Crush the Diversity Talent Pipeline.”
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University administrators find it difficult to defend their stated purpose for affirmative action when confronted with the truth that biological races are not a scientific reality. After all, why is it necessary to judge admittance based upon a person’s “race” when there is no such biological thing? How could “race” have anything to do with a student’s potential contributions in a classroom environment? Is the fact that a student is typified as “Asian” going to impact the way he navigates a chemistry class? Is it the case that a student’s being defined as “Pacific Islander” will inherently affect her discussions in a philosophy class? Isn’t the view that “race” does affect those things just plain racism?
Faced with these difficult questions, some affirmative action defenders have claimed that “race” is relevant to college admissions insofar as it pertains to experiences of racialization.
For example, Benjamin Rossi of the Prindle Post wrote, in defending against Alito’s comment, that “[a]n applicant’s self-ascription as, say, Black tells us that she likely possesses a perspective informed by the experience of being labeled Black — a label that has a particular significance in American society.”
This is really pushing the self-contradiction of affirmative action. It says: we need to racialize all of our applicants so that the ones we admit can share their perspective of being racialized. And for each person admitted to a Harvard classroom ostensibly so that he or she can discuss his or her experience of being racialized, another student is excluded from the classroom on the basis of his or her designated “race.” This is just treating racialization with more racialization and hoping (or pretending) that it solves the problem.
In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”
Though the Left claims that it understands there to be no biological reality to race, it uses different admissions standards for each “race.” According to a Princeton University study, an Asian applicant to Harvard with an SAT score of 1500 has the same chance of being accepted as a white student with one of 1360, a Hispanic student with 1230, or an African American student with 1050. This demonstrates, in stark relief, that the Left sees different “races” as being biologically distinct and thus in need of different admissions standards.
Famously, Harvard administrators gave lower “personal rating” scores to students it typified as part of an “Asian” race, even though those numbers did not match the assessments of local alumni. Evidently, Harvard racializes students whose ancestry comes from Asia as being part of a supposed biological group that is inherently less personable and charismatic. It believes that they are, therefore, less worthy of constituting a significant proportion of their idealized community.
The Left’s goal of increasing the number of certain “races” in elite settings — couched at times as giving a voice to groups who are racialized or as remedying past harm — necessarily relies upon treating people as though they belong to a “type” of human that is determinative of the kind of person they are.
As Justice Clarence Thomas argued, “Every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”
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