Racial discrimination, long institutionalized across American academia, became an even stronger priority these last five years as colleges and universities rushed to the very woke-est concepts of “justice”; unwinding it all will require bitter battles indeed.
President Donald Trump last week directed Education Secretary Linda MacMahon to start collecting data from nearly every US university with an eye in on enforcing the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning most race-based college admissions.
That’s absolutely necessary, because most leaders of American higher education insist that such discrimination is simple justice to make up for past discrimination.
But the way these policies play out proves it’s not.
Notably, all these systems disadvantage Asian Americans (East and South Asians), even though past discrimination never worked in those groups’ favor.
And immigrants of African descent whose parents arrived quite recently nonetheless routinely win admission to top schools thanks to these quotas.
In short, the Ivy League and all the rest are every bit as obsessed with simple skin color as any Jim Crow white supremacist.
And as determined to rationalize it.
Notably, medical schools across the country justify drastic anti-white and -Asian discrimination by pointing to (scant and seriously faulty) research that claimed to find that black patients have far better outcomes with black doctors.
Mind you, schools can pursue equal opportunity with income-based preferences; they just have to abandon the beyond-lazy categorization of everyone by skin color that they’ve self-righteously embraced for decades.
Imagining you have a hard empirical basis for your bigotry is all too human, and admitting that you don’t is deeply challenging for all the folks who’ve believed for decades that they’re fighting racism with these policies.
That it’s the Trump administration exposing their fundamental injustice makes the humiliation burn even deeper.
