End of affirmative action in U.S. college admissions
Although in a restricted way, U.S. universities until recently could favor racial minorities for admission. However, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled on June 29 that skin color would no longer be an element to allow admission to U.S. universities. This, which had been considered a positive discrimination policy, has now been deleted. Some organizations have specified that the ruling goes against the principle of the prohibition of the regression of rights. Positive discrimination for admission to universities arose in the struggles of the 1960s.
The same president, Joe Biden, has spoken out against the Court’s judicial decision. Likewise, the Democratic leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, described the decision as ill-advised. Instead, Donald Trump and Republican leader Kevin McCarthy hailed the resolution for returning to the path of “merit.”
For decades, the Supreme Court recognized a college’s freedom to decide how to build a diverse student body and provide opportunity.
Today, the Court walked away from precedent, effectively ending affirmative action in higher education.
I strongly disagree with this decision.
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 29, 2023
The conservative organization Students for Fair Admissions, led by Edward Blum, was the one that sued before the Court the violation of the rights of non-discrimination in cases of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The Court’s decision is even more surprising because it mentions that Harvard’s policies would have violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which is against racial discrimination. The conservative composition of the Court was entrenched in its vote, with 6 votes in favor in each case, 3 against, in the case of North Carolina, and 2 against for Harvard.
Judge John Roberts, draftsman of the majority, asserts that “skin color” was wrongly taken as a point of identity instead of abilities. This argument uses the criterion of positive discrimination in reverse; that is to say, that rights would be violated by considering the stereotype of skin color for admission. Thus, Harvard and North Carolina would have misused these principles by barring whites and Asians from entering.
Roberts wrote that Harvard’s admissions processes are based on that pernicious stereotype that “a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot.” However, the resolution emphasizes that the past of racial discrimination can be used in favor of the application.
For her part, Judge Sonia Sotomayor criticized the decision, for being a setback of several decades in U.S. legal precedents. In addition, the real problem that the sentence opens is that its application will lead to more lawsuits for racial discrimination.
The Court ruling has an ideological interpretation, to say that the rights of minorities are a racist stereotype, which strengthens the American white hegemony.
The Nahel case in France
The killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk on June 27 by a police officer’s shot was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The crime joins a record of similar incidents.
At the time of Nahel’s murder, France had not yet overcome the social upheaval caused by Emmanuel Macron to reform the country’s social security, so the population was in an active mobilization phase. Several towns in Paris rose up and soon the whole country.
The authorities reported disturbances; on the first day of the protests alone, 667 people were arrested. “What am I going to do now?” Merzouk’s mother said after learning of the fact, and her words were replicated in the protests. The teenager was of Algerian origin, which pointed to a crime of racial segregation. The Nahel case became a national issue.
After several days of disturbances, Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin was rebuked by the Senate’s Internal Affairs Committee. Most of the protesters are between the ages of 12 and 17.
However, the central knot of the anti-racial mobilizations should not be confused with the objective of the press that defends Macron, which brands the entire riot movement as social misfits. The burning of vehicles, buildings, patrol cars, looting, and even attacks on mayors have been the focus of mainstream media attention. Many of them hide the problems of migration and reactivate the issue of the attacks in 2015 against Charlie Hebdo for having published caricatures of Muhammad.
The reality of discrimination is corroborated by the institutionality, people who are perceived as being of African or Arab descent are “twenty times more likely to be detained by the French police.”
Racial formations
The slave structure with which the United States survived in the 19th century and part of the 20th, the composition of the metropolises that geographically segregated Afro-descendants, and later Asians, Latinos and other ethnic groups, have not been completely overcome in the 21st century.
In the most recent protests, the Black Lives Matter movement began with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 of a conviction for the shooting to death of an African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin; it was strengthened in 2014, by the protests over the murder of the young Michael Brown and Eric Garner; and the case that caused the greatest repercussion in the United States and the world, the murder of George Floyd by suffocation in an act of police brutality, by Dereck Chauvin, while Floyd said: I can’t breathe.
All these crimes show the cruel institutional racial differences, as well as what Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow: mass racial incarceration. It is impossible to talk about discrimination without touching these reliefs moderately; and obviously that inequality in college admissions can be sustained from different angles.
The independence and liberation of several French colonies in the mid-20th century modified the subordination between them and the imperialist center, and their economic and political influence; like the bloody independence of Algeria in 1962. Migration from African and Arab countries to France has constantly changed its internal structure, leading to the construction of different types of peripheries; neighborhoods and suburbs that are home to diverse ethnic groups, neglected by municipalities, with few social and public services.
The mobilizations against Macron’s social security reforms were also nourished by these discriminated working classes. However, the advance of the French extreme right that reached the second round in 2017 and 2022 is undeniable. It is unquestionable that the explosion of the Nahel case obtained the convergence of these complicated social moments.
