Affirmative action

When Zohran Mamdani applied to Columbia University in 2009, he checked both the “Asian” and “Black or African American” boxes on his admissions form. He wasn’t lying – technically. Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani said he was trying to express his complex heritage. But in a recent interview with The New York Times, he admitted something telling: he doesn’t consider himself black.That admission, buried beneath the usual progressive buzzwords about “nuance” and “complexity,” should be a wake-up call for anyone still defending race-based admissions in elite education. Mamdani didn’t cheat the system. He played by its rules. And that’s exactly the problem.

Those who wonder why more Americans haven’t risen up in rebellion against the Trump administration’s assault on affirmative action, its gutting of university departments, its violation of the neutrality of the American legal profession, should keep in mind the epigraph from the 20th-century philosopher Will Durant that appears in the opening moments of Mel Gibson’s 2006 movie Apocalypto: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” As he promised to do, Donald Trump is dismantling large parts of the government he conquered at the ballot box last November. You don’t have to approve. Roughly half of Americans do not. But the regime he is undoing has yielded diminishing returns for most of this century.

Last Friday, a day after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, I noted the gap between the Democratic Party’s leaders and its voters on race-based admissions. Polls find a majority of Democrats opposed to using race as a factor in admissions. The party’s elite, however, is almost universally in favor of affirmative action — as hysterical reactions from the president and others made clear.  But that was last week. Now that the dust has settled, and everyone has had a chance to cool down over July 4, have the Democrats gained some Independence-Day perspective on the end of race-based decisions? Not really.

Anyone looking for a villain in the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down decades of affirmative action precedent will find one in Clarence Thomas. Critics have long found Thomas’s politics vexing in light of his race, a frustration that has only grown more pronounced as the affirmative action decision drew near. To hear his detractors tell it, Thomas was himself the beneficiary of affirmative action policies, both as an undergraduate at the College of the Holy Cross and later at Yale Law School. That Thomas could have such an experience and still strike down race-based admissions policies seems to make him a hypocrite — and an ungrateful one at that.

The Supreme Court is entering the home stretch of its session, with just days left before it goes into recess for the summer. Some of the most significant decisions have yet to be issued, teeing up a big week. Here is what some of those cases are. Moore v. Harper This case tackles whether a state’s supreme court can rule on gerrymandering cases. The plaintiffs are testing the independent state legislature theory, which argues that state legislatures have the prerogative in redistricting, and that state supreme courts cannot get involved in the process. North Carolina’s supreme court has since switched its original decision against the state legislature, meaning that the US Supreme Court might drop the case instead of issuing a decision. Students for Fair Admissions v.

Four billion dollars in debt relief for black farmers only. Special stipends for Black, “Latinx” and Native American entrepreneurs. Minority- and women-owned restaurants prioritized for pandemic recovery funds. School admissions policies designed to reduce the number of whites and Asians. Racial preference programs have become ubiquitous in American society. When was the last time you filled out an official form without being asked to disclose your race? In the name of ending racism, we have been divided and labeled according to vague and outdated racial classifications that are then used to benefit certain groups at the expense of others. Is there hope for a more race-neutral America?