First President Lyndon Johnson: When Race Meets Discrimination: A Response to a Case against Reconstruction and Black Holes in the United States
On June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gave a historic speech at Howard University outlining the intellectual and moral basis for affirmative action. He invoked a metaphor that still stands today, saying, “You don’t take a person who has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him,” less than one year after the Civil Rights Act was passed.
The reason that some US universities have adopted race-conscious admissions — sometimes referred to as affirmative action — is to address centuries of racism and exclusion in the United States. This issue makes it more difficult for minorities to be admitted to academic institutions.
The intensity and duration of the attack is sad confirmation that many Americans remain unwilling to reckon with the barbarity of our racial history. Every period of progress for Black people has been met with a racial backlash. In response to the Civil War, the white people of the south created a new myth about slavery, which was called Reconstruction. More than a century later, this insistence on denying history lives on. Witness the laws in a growing number of conservative states that prohibit teaching the truth about racial oppression, with dismissal and possibly even jail for teachers who dare to defy them.
The attorney general of Oklahoma filed a brief on behalf of several states in support of the plaintiffs in the two cases: “The University of Oklahoma, for example, remains just as diverse today (if not more so) than it was when Oklahoma banned affirmative action in 2012.” The university’s main campus in Norman currently has a U.S. undergraduate student population that is about 60% white and 5% Black.
Roberts wrote that the policies at UNC and Harvard didn’t use them within the confines of the narrow restrictions that previous court rulings had allowed.
Roberts also wrote that schools could still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, “be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” He wrote through a specific application essay.
“Nothing is as good at helping to enroll a more racially equitable class than using race. “There’s nothing else that comes close to it.” says Baker. “There are other tools; other ideas. But if race is not taken into consideration, those different types of techniques and tools do not replicate what race-conscious admissions policies do.”
There are nearly 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., and only a small portion — slightly more than 200 — have highly selective admissions, where fewer than 50% of applicants get in. A race-conscious admissions process ruling may make a difference at just over 200 schools.
They remain a key gatekeeper to access at high levels of government and industry. As just one example, currently eight of the nine Supreme Court justices attended law school at Harvard or Yale.
Race and ethnicity in California’s high school admissions: How many black students went to college? A question of the “Infamous 96”
In the simulations, removing race and relying on different combinations of high school grades, test scores, or social-economic indicators did not yield more ethnically diverse classes.
The more information that you can gather about the educational opportunities and the disadvantages that an individual has had, the better you are able to understand who is a qualified candidate.
The current admissions criteria reinforce the disparity between the opportunity that exists in the K-12 system and the opportunity that is available to high caliber students at highly quality colleges, according to Mabel.
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban at public universities in the state. Before the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA were roughly representative of the California high school graduate population who were eligible for enrollment at universities, according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University.
She wonders, for example, whether a program designed to increase the number of Black doctors — with support to complete the pre-med curriculum and get into medical school — will now be challenged.
OiYan Poon, a visiting educational professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, argues in court that the Harvard case shows that race and ethnicity should not be considered in an educational setting.
Baker said that it was important to make sure we didn’t overstate what the legal contours were, because that could cause a chilling effect. She’s especially interested in the line in Justice Roberts’ majority opinion about how schools can still consider the way race impacted an applicant’s life.
After California banned race-conscious admissions in 1996, the proportions of Black and Latino students at UCLA, one of the most highly selective schools in the state’s system, fell drastically. By 2006, a decade later, only 96 Black students enrolled in a freshman class of nearly 5,000. They became known as the “Infamous 96.”
The University of California responded to those numbers by recrafting its admissions policies to take a more “holistic” approach, considering several factors including whether students were the first in their family to go to college, what high school they went to, and their family’s income. Over the past two decades, the university has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on programs and scholarships in an effort to restore that level of diversity.
The University of Texas at Austin admits a percentage of the state’s high school students, in order to promote campus diversity. The proposed lottery would randomly select eligible students with high qualifications for acceptance.
Both of the cases were very similar, but Harvard is a private school and the UNC is a state school that gives preferential treatment to in-state students.
The University of California chancellors said that their years of crafting race-neutral policies have not been enough in their submission to the Supreme Court.
In the absence of race in the admissions process, Kelly Slay, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies affirmative action, expects to see colleges increase targeted recruitment, expand financial aid including free-college programs, and go test-optional, in an effort to maintain their ethnic and racial diversity.
We don’t have anything that works better at producing and enhancing racial diversity than affirmative action. We have over 20 years of data on that.
The impact of Trump’s 6-3 ruling on the composition and faculty make-up of higher education: implications for science, technology, engineering and mathematics
The 6-3 ruling, split on ideological lines, reflects the court’s rightward turn under Republican President Donald Trump, who appointed three justices to the nine-person bench.
This decision will not only have sweeping effects on the composition of student bodies, but it could also affect the make-up of staff, says Julie Park, a researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park, whose work focuses on racial equality in higher education. The pathway to the professoriate is dependent on these elite or name-brand institutions.
A study was published last September in Nature2 stating that 20% of institutions that grant PhDs in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members over a four-year period. The list does not have any historically Black colleges and universities or Hispanic-serving institutions.
Without race-conscious admissions, the future diversity of future generations of scientists might suffer as well. Black and Hispanic workers are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, making up only 9% and 8% of the total workforce in the United States. (Black people make up around 14% of the US population, and Hispanic people account for nearly 19%.) Park is very concerned because, even with race-conscious admission policies in place,STEM hasn’t been doing so great.
If elite colleges ended legacy admissions, students would not have to take standardized testing, and alumni family members would benefit because they’d be able to get in with a better chance of being accepted. White, wealthy applicants have been shown to get preferential treatment in both practices.
The Californian Student Admissions Problem: The Importance of Maintaining Race-Conciseness as a Service of Black and Latino Students
The problem is that, as a matter of history, it’s not true. The 14th Amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was expressly intended to allow for race-conscious legislation, as Justice Sotomayor noted emphatically on Thursday. The same Congress that passed the amendment enacted several such laws, including the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts, which helped former slaves secure housing, food, jobs and education.
The president of a private university in Southern California is worried about the effects of the state affirmative action ban.
Mitchell Chang, the associate vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA, said “most do not want to attend a university where there is not a Critical mass of same race peers.” He said that attending a school that is less diverse by an affirmative action ban makes them vulnerable to being stereotyped and isolated.
In 2020, the UC system no longer required standardized test scores as an admission requirement, nixing a factor that some say disadvantages low-income students.
And as the nation’s highest court has grown more conservative in recent years, court-watchers wondered if it would reverse decades-old precedents allowing affirmative action.
As college admissions offices prepare to tailor their policies to the Supreme Court ruling, California offers lessons on what may be in store for the rest of the country.
“If you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action,” Bleemer said.
Prospective Black and Latino students have found the ban to be a deterrent. His study found that high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.
Last summer, more than 80 major corporations and businesses filed three briefs with the Supreme Court in support, arguing these policies help increase workforce diversity and improve company performance.
“Experience in a diverse university environment prepares students to interact with and serve racially diverse client and customer bases and to work with people of all backgrounds,” according to one brief written by over 60 prominent businesses, including Apple, General Electric, Google and Johnson & Johnson.
Many of the larger companies he consults for understand the importance of maintaining race-conscious programs as members ofGeneration Z and future generations enter the workforce.
“And so while the Supreme Court, they live in a rarefied space where most of us don’t live because we live in the real world, business leaders are going to need to figure out a way to make this work if they’re going to source future talent and sell to future consumers,” he says. That is the reality of it.
“The current structure of the workforces in corporate America suggests that there are tons of gaps between the races,” Tillery said, adding, “Diversity, equity and inclusion work can be reframed as trying to figure out what’s behind the processes creating these gaps and then filling the void by creating structures and processes to make sure that you’re not discriminating under Title VII.”
But Tillery doesn’t expect any changes to DEI initiatives overnight. He argues that those programs fall under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and that companies can maintain their programs by reframing their language.
“This ruling means we can strike hard legally in our courts now and win major victories. Miller wrote a statement saying it was time to wage lawfare against the DEI colossus.
Doing away with DEI-style programs has been a consistent part of conservative political messaging in recent years. America First Legal, a nonprofit run by Stephen Miller that is focused on abolishing race-focused policies and other right-leaning groups are already calling for more action.
The Supreme Court’s decision on race-conscious programs in the workplace is what will shift the focus of the mainly conservative groups that backed Students for Fair Admissions’ lawsuit.
“I already think that there are going to be some real repercussions,” said Alvin Tillery, a political science professor at Northwestern University, who runs a consulting firm that works with organizations and companies, including Google and Abbott, on DEI-related programs.
Though the opinion focuses on higher education, some legal experts say it could lead to change in commonplace workplace initiatives like diversity and inclusion.
The Supreme Court ruling that effectively ends affirmative action in higher education raises questions regarding the future of employer-run initiatives and programs that consider race.
No Hard Feelings, Superman and Lois: NBC News and The Commerce Department Inflation and Personal Spending During the March Outage
TV: NPR critic Eric Deggans has fallen in love with the CW’s Superman and Lois. He writes about how the show reinvents the iconic couple and the role helplessness plays in Superman’s character arc.
Movies: Jennifer Lawrence takes a crack at comedy in No Hard Feelings, a film about rich helicopter parents who hire a woman to seduce their teenage son to get him ready for college.
Nassim was laughing when he was born. After the civil war of 1975, he laughed at the destruction of his restaurant. He rebuilt and opened a shop that served Middle Eastern desserts. The store is still standing. NPR contributor Ari Daniel, who married Haddad’s cousin, chats with him amid the sounds of crispy, crunchy desserts being baked about how he’s able to keep laughing through decades of turmoil.
The Commerce Department will release May inflation and personal spending figures later this morning. Personal spending increased 4% in the first three months of the year but then went up again in April, despite rising interest rates.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1185273194/up-first-briefing-affirmative-action-student-loan-forgiveness-actors-strike-loom
The Up First Podcast: Breaking the Screening Window for a Free, Fair, and Accurate Picture of Modern-Day Motion Picture Production
The contract with the major studios, networks, and streamers ends tonight. If an agreement is not reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, actors could go on strike. They’d be joining the writers who are on strike.
A Supreme Court decision has tens of millions of Americans anticipating. The justices are expected to give their opinion later today on the president’s student loan forgiveness plan.
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