Supreme Court affirmative action case pretends we haven't already wrecked Black college access

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The Philadelphia Inquirer
@PhillyInquirer
"When it comes to college access," @will_bunch writes, "the real issue may prove less what the High Court decides about Harvard and UNC and more about what those schools decide to do about making the dream of a diploma accessible to everyone."

inquirer.com
Supreme Court affirmative action case pretends we haven’t already wrecked Black college access |...
While the High Court looks poised to kill affirmative action in college admissions, we've ignored the real crisis of declining Black enrollment.
2:58 PM · Feb 3, 2022

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/declining-us-black-college-enrollment-20220203.html

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To a group calling itself Students for Fair Admissions, the case for racism in access to the University of North Carolina was open and shut. The group, run by a 60-something veteran right-wing activist famous for filing the lawsuit that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and with nary an actual student in sight, claimed in a federal lawsuit that its statistical analysis showed the deck was stacked against whites applying to the Tar Heel State’s flagship public university.

The bitter irony is that UNC is hardly some kind of academic Wakanda. To the contrary, the current admissions process at the nation’s oldest public university — in which the applicant’s race is just one of a number of factors — had yielded a 2019 freshman class that was only 8.9% Black, even though census data showed African Americans comprised more than 22% of state’s population. More broadly, North Carolina is one of a number of states where Black access to college campuses notably declined during the 2010s.

Black students and faculty say the numbers don’t even tell the whole story of racial backsliding at a university that was integrated only by a 1955 federal court order. In ruling against the anti-affirmative action plaintiffs, U.S. District Court Judge Loretta C. Biggs wrote in October that “nearly 70 years after the first Black students were admitted to UNC, the minority students at the university still report being confronted with racial epithets, as well as feeling isolated, ostracized, stereotyped and viewed as tokens.”

Despite all of that, the notion that admission to the University of North Carolina is instead biased against whites is headed for a major showdown starting this fall at the U.S. Supreme Court. Many watchers of the High Court believe that in agreeing to hear the UNC case — and a similar lawsuit by Students for Fair Admission against Harvard, which also says factoring race in admissions harms Asian-Americans — a Donald Trump-boosted 6-3 conservative majority is eager to finally end more than 50 years of race as a factor in U.S. college admissions.


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