As the nation’s incipient racial reckoning following last May’s killing of George Floyd morphed into the summer’s riotous anarchy, the term “systemic racism” emerged as a fixture of our public discourse. What began as a somewhat arcane dialogue about purported police “militarization” and the “qualified immunity” legal doctrine soon took on a much more insidious tone. America, those like The New York Times’ “1619 Project” fabulists told us, was rotten to its very core, blemished by the indelible taint of “systemic racism.”
In reality, as many courageously pointed out amid unprecedented “cancel culture” headwinds seeking to stifle all dissent, there is no such thing as “systemic racism” that afflicts all of America’s leading institutions. Despite the claim attaining mythological status, there is no factual basis to support it. There will, sadly, always be individual racists from all backgrounds and all walks of life, but American society in the 2020s simply does not have anything remotely resembling a legally enshrined regime under which its racial majority “systemically” oppresses its racial minorities. America in the year 2021 is not Germany in 1936; it is not South Africa in 1985; and it is not — after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the Jim Crow South. This ought to be astoundingly obvious.
But while the notion of sprawling, multi-institutional “systemic racism” is a lie, there is at least one major American institution that does suffer from legally codified racism that tarnishes the institution’s integrity, sullies its legitimacy and is so widespread that it might earnestly be dubbed “systemic.” I speak, of course, of affirmative action admission policies in American higher education.
Thankfully, due to the petition for a writ of certiorari that was filed before the U.S. Supreme Court just this week in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the nightmarish systemic racism of affirmative action might finally end soon. (As a disclosure, I personally know Students for Fair Admissions’ attorneys, one of whom is now representing me before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in unrelated litigation.)
There is at least some cause for optimism. A divided Court in 2016 upheld race-conscious university admissions policies in Fisher v. University of Texas, but the Court’s composition has changed since then due to the successful Trump-era nominations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. What’s more, affirmative action is perhaps the single issue upon which infamous Republican-nominated disappointment Chief Justice John Roberts is the most reliable. In addition to his joining Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Fisher, it was Roberts who, in the 2007 race-conscious education case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” At a bare minimum, then, there should be four votes to grant the writ of certiorari and hear the case.
Affirmative action might have been devised as a well-intentioned effort to eradicate the vestiges of antebellum chattel slavery, but as Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his 1995 concurrence in Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena, “Government sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice.”
And discriminate Harvard does. The university maintains noxious de facto racial quotas to penalize Asian Americans, redolent of the anti-Jewish Ivy League quotas of the early 20th century. Harvard’s lawyers conceded at trial that Asian Americans are penalized by the admissions office’s nebulous “personal rating” category — and they are penalized simply for the fact of being Asian. The university engages in deliberate racial balancing, seeking to fill its incoming freshman classes with a largely preconceived, annually consistent racial breakdown.
Harvard’s admission data are eye-opening. For high school applicants in the top academic decile of their class, whites are admitted at a rate of 15.3%; Asian Americans are admitted at a rate of 12.7%; Hispanics are admitted at a rate of 31.3%; and blacks are admitted at a rate of 56.1%. Poor refugees from Communist China and impoverished white students from Appalachia are thus placed at a “systemic” racial disadvantage relative to well-off Hispanics and blacks. In no rational universe is this a just arrangement.
Legal conservatives usually have myriad reasons for pessimism, but affirmative action could prove an exception. The justices have a real chance to deliver a grievous blow to the systemic racism that blights one of the nation’s leading institutions. Let’s hope they don’t blow it.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Look at the communist Democrats. These Democrats practice “systemic racism” against the Asian students, who are the best of the best. So, in essence, Harvard does not admit the best of the best. Harvard is a school of lower standards. How is that for “systemic racism”, communist Democrats?
BEING how kavenaugh, gorsuchk and barret, have stabbed us in the back, repeatedly RE voter integrity, i have LITTLE HOPE Of them cancelling affirmative action.
never happen the court is feckless.
Among the most destructive Supreme Court innovations of the 20th Century, is that Disparate Impact constitutes de facto Discrimination.
When asked for evidence of this purported “systemic racism”, all someone has to do is point out that some groups on average perform better academically, socially, financially, etc., and by Disparate Impact, the explanation must be discrimination.
Under this same reasoning, the NBA is guilty of discrimination against people under 5’6″, against most racial groups, and against women. Unfortunately, it is only ever used to create a scapegoat that allows people to gloss over the actual problems.
ANd it’s ONLY USED against whites, and in favor of blacks/asians/latinos. NEVER AGAINST them in favor of whites.
Unless the 87% get sick and tired of being told what they can say, or do, or even think, by the 13%, nothing is going to change. It’s time for the 87% to take this country back, even if it means the start of that second civil/race war that people have been talking about for the last several years.
“Harvard’s admission data are eye-opening. For high school applicants in the top academic decile of their class, whites are admitted at a rate of 15.3%; Asian Americans are admitted at a rate of 12.7%; Hispanics are admitted at a rate of 31.3%; and blacks are admitted at a rate of 56.1%. ”
In the 17th and 18th centuries, estimate 6 to 8 million enslaved Africans were brought the America.
Today there are about 50 million blacks in the U.S.
Government contracts give blacks a 10% advantage when bidding on a contracts.
The democrat party wants to give every black in the country a lot $$$ Reparation, because their ancestors might have been a slave in the U.S. 200 years ago
But according to the blacks and the dishonorable, dishonest Democrat Party.
Blacks are being discriminated against and killed by the White “systemic racism” .
I.A.W. U.S. Census & FBI (Table 43a) Black males make up about 8% of the U.S. population but commit 53% of all the murders and 55% of all robberies in the U.S… Every year there are ~6,000 African-Americans men, women and children killed and 94% of them were killed by fellow African-Americans.
How many black bodies do you have to step over to get to the one that you think is important only because a White police officer was involved?
The most amazing phenomenon in my life is the emerging reality that there is enough insanity in the American population to allow the type of racial brainwashing we are experiencing. I can’t really understand if the support for this insanity is as large as it appears with all the corporate support and encouragement of the “cancel culture”, and the educational establishment’s radical policies, or if the socialist elitists have successfully co-opted enough of our communication capability to make it appear the support for their radical agenda is overwhelming. I would say the latter is the logical answer until I think about the fact that Biden received even the number of legal votes he received in the election. The only possible answer is the American public has been dumbed down to the point that the big lie has become reality.
That has always been the goal of the communist when they took over the democrat party and it was easy to take over the democrat because it was the democrats who started the Civil War and it was the democrats who ran the KKK and passed Jim Crow laws in the deep south. Racism likes company regardless of who the racist are racist against.
THIS IS why we should have fought, tooth and nail AGAINST THEIR agenda, back in the 70s and 80s, when they were TAKING OVER OUR Schooling systems… STOP it back them, before it morphed into this monster it has become.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” No Truer words were spoken, and the guarantee of equality of opportunity over forced equality of outcomes, that degrade those outcomes to the lowest common denominator that leads to an outcome of equal failure. To promote one race over another to justify imagined reparations based on dead precedents, dead people and laws long dead, just promotes a different kind of systemic racism, just as destructive to a nation as the first. No nation can excel, when their best and brightest are culled out of university because their skin color is assumed to make them prejudiced. We just end up educating people beyond their abilities to excel, based on a half-truth. This is a form of systemic racism itself that not only destroys the stem of our American Tree of Liberty, but destroys it down to its very roots of our special human existence, and only the undesirable bitter fruit of division is produced.
Those promoting the notion of systemic racism seem not to comprehend that such promotion is in itself racism and systemic, that basically announcing that one race is racist IS racist, and that Affirmative Action is also a form of racism.
Some American Universities seem to be headed to or engaging in a form of racism by limiting the admittance of races and colors that are not “white” or of some Oriental extraction. They are demonstrating that not being biased is extremely difficult if not impossible where large groupings such as ethnicity, religion, and color or concerned. Somebody somewhere is always going to be favored and have been so throughout history. Racism is being promoted so that “domestic terrorists’ can be “pursued” by extra-constitutional methods as evidenced by banks surrendering credit card information regarding people in D.C. on January 6th and probably accessing communication records for the same date. Consider that to get the card information on those who used their cards in the D.C. area from say January 4th through the 7th EVERY card transaction had to be examined in some way shape or form which is evil even if done by the card issuer and not the government.
THEY Comprehend it fully, THEY JUST DON’T CARE, “cause ‘whitey is evil, and all we can do to punish them, is GOOD!”
About time and while you’re in this arena addend H1B workers. Both affect the American economy by removing jobs from able bodied Americans.
I say ELIMINATE ALL worker visas, TILL EVERY AMERICAN OUT OF WORK is back in work. AND that goes especially for those welfare leeches.
Not about jobs, it’s about votes. PERIOD!
For so many years, it’s been clear that Affirmative Action has discriminated against Asian students in America, and for the GOP not to capitalize on this issue in order to gain more support among that ethnic group remained a mystery. Trump was the first prez to take advantage of this which would seem a solid winning argument, a major pathway in bringing in a portion of a minority voting bloc for generations. Without him, it will be another opportunity lost.
The GOP. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, year after year..
Here in the south, we have had busing since the early70’s same school, same teacher ,same classroom and same textbook . But they still can’t pass. We had to lower the standards and they still can’t pass. If parents don’t make education important ,then neither will a child. That’s why they need affirmative action. There own black leaders demand black children are passed ,even if they can’t do the work ,or its racist.
Catering to the lowest denominator.. Stupid imo.