US Politics

On Friday the US supreme court expanded the right to free speech into a right of businesses to discriminate. In a 6-3 decision, with the majority opinion by Neil Gorsuch, the justices declared that a Colorado civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public businesses violates the first amendment’s freedom of speech. The ruling appears to formalize the right of homophobic business owners to not serve gay people in some situations.303 Creative v Elenis concerns a woman, Lorie Smith, who operates a website design service and wishes to be exempted from a Colorado civil rights law that requires her to treat all customers equally. Specifically, Smith, a conservative Christian, wants to be able to refuse service to same-sex couples seeking wedding websites, and to be able to place a banner on the home page of her business declaring that she will not make such sites. The court has in recent years dramatically expanded the free exercise of religion clause, often granting conservative Christian plaintiffs leeway to curtail their personal obligations to the law. But 303 Creative offers a different theory of the case: that the legal requirement not to discriminate against gay people is a violation of the plaintiff’s free speech.It’s an odd, and expansive, vision of “speech”. There’s nothing stopping the web designer from, say, buying a billboard to advertise her opposition to gay rights, or from speaking out against such rights in her own writing, electioneering, internet posts and personal life. But Smith didn’t just want to be able to avail herself of all the vast opportunities for speech, expression, debate and persuasion available to her. She wanted to express her bigotry in her business, via the conduct of her public-facing commercial enterprise. She wanted to be able to discriminate at work.The supreme court has now allowed her to. The justices’ decision pertains to the allegedly narrow question of “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the first amendment”. But there is no real limiting principle in the 303 decision, no matter what the court says; no guarantee that the precedent this decision sets will confine itself to legalizing only discrimination against gay people, or only refusal of service for weddings.Indeed, the case threatens to unravel a whole matrix of anti-discrimination laws governing public accommodations, redefining public-facing commercial enterprises as speech and discrimination as personal expression. The label that Smith wants to put at the top of her business website – effectively declaring that only straight people can be served – evokes the darkest history of public discrimination in this country. The decision’s coming impact on America’s public sphere – where, now, businesses will claim an entitlement to discriminate against vast swaths of the public whom they don’t like – will unfold over the course of years, and it will be profound.If 303 Creative sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an almost beat-by-beat rerun of a similar challenge to the same Colorado law, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, where the court did not rule on the merits. In Masterpiece, a baker was asked to make a cake for two gay men’s wedding, and sued for the right to refuse them service.Masterpiece garnered a lot of media attention, and much of it focused on the gay couple themselves – two men, in love and looking to celebrate a joyous milestone in their lives, who were subjected to bigotry and indignity, because of a baker who declared he had a right to make hatred a plank of his business. The men looked innocent, victimized, sympathetic. The court looked mendacious, opportunistic and cruel. They blinked.The supreme court likes to pretend that it is not influenced by politics, but the court is in fact a profoundly political institution, tasked with calculating, just as any congressman does, how best to pursue unpopular Republican policy agendas with the least amount of popular pushback. The sympathetic gay couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case threatened to provoke pushback. That, as much as any putative legal concern, is why the court then punted.They did not punt in 303 Creative, in part because there is no couple. In fact Smith, the web designer, was never asked to make a website for a gay wedding. At the time she filed her lawsuit, she didn’t even have an actual web design business. (She has one now, and the quality of the work does not make me suspect that gay couples are lining up to have her make websites on their behalf.) It’s not clear that the designer even has standing to sue – she never experienced the event that she says would so injure her.But this means the case has a political virtue for the conservative justices: because there is no real injury in Smith’s case, there is also no gay couple who she has harmed, no one to give face to the impact of her now legally sanctioned bigotry. The decision will create such victims, but the court itself does not have to answer for them in its opinion.303 Creative, then, is not so much a lawsuit over an actual conflict as it is a fiction of the conservative legal movement. The anti-gay legal machine arguing the case, Alliance Defending Freedom, found a plaintiff and concocted a complaint out of thin air specifically to avoid the pitfalls they encountered in Masterpiece. Interestingly, the New Republic reported earlier this week that a gay man who allegedly contacted Smith asking for her services may not even exist – or rather, that there is a man by the same name, but that he is straight, has been married to a woman for many years, and was wholly unaware that his name was being used in the case.Oral arguments in December were conducted with roughly the same degree of bad faith, with Samuel Alito hijacking the proceedings at one point to pose hypotheticals involving children in Klan robes, a pointed and suggestive remark about dating websites addressed to Elena Kagan, and a convoluted scenario about a Black man playing Santa Claus at a mall.That was about the level of argument advanced by the conservative lawyers, too, who attacked civil rights law via a profoundly cynical rationale: that to eliminate the obligation to serve all comers equally, and to legally sanction bigotry as an operating feature of a public business, would be to advance the cause of pluralism.The argument in 303 Creative has the reasoning of an internet troll: that protecting the right to discriminate against gays in fact preserves diversity; that is, the kind of diversity that’s present when homophobes can discriminate and deny service in their businesses without sanction from the state. The diversity that is encouraged when all people, regardless of identity, can participate as equals in the public square is evidently not as meaningful.Conservative opposition to civil rights law has long argued that not discriminating hurts the dignity of bigots. But the majority opinion seems uninterested in the dignity of gay couples, who now must be subjected to rejection and patronizing lectures about religious freedom when they are only seeking to buy flowers or wedding invitations. Their dignity, their ability to move through the public square with safety and respect, does not matter as much to the court.And this is the baseline assumption of so much of this court’s jurisprudence: that there are some people whose dignity and freedom matters, and must be cognizable to the law – and some whose dignity and freedom do not matter, and can be ignored.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Be it congressional campaigns or defending Donald Trump from his many legal entanglements, Republicans have kept up a consistent message to the US: Democrats can’t be trusted to keep you safe.“Alvin Bragg … is going after President Trump when you have all kinds of things happening in his town that are harmful to families who live there,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, one of Trump’s top allies in Congress, said on Fox News after the Democratic Manhattan prosecutor in March indicted Trump for allegedly falsifying business records. Jordan, who chairs the House judiciary committee, appeared to be ignoring data that shows New York is one of the safest cities in the country.As the Covid-19 pandemic upended the American economy and day-to-day life in 2020, homicides shot up by 30%, the largest one-year jump on record. Republicans used that spike, along with broader crime concerns, as a cudgel against Democrats to successfully regain control of the House of Representatives two years later.But Third Way, a center-left thinktank, has found that states which voted for Trump in the 2020 election had overall higher murder rates than those which supported Joe Biden. This trend, called the “red state murder gap”, has been consistent for 20 years. The pattern remains the same even if the most populous county in each red state is excluded – undercutting an argument common on the right that large cities, which tend to be led by Democrats, are to blame for homicides.“There’s a narrative out there that the crime problem is a blue states, blue city crime problem,” said Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice-president for policy and an author of the study. “We thought, ‘OK, let’s challenge that, let’s see if it’s true.’ And it’s not.”What’s harder to tease out is why this split exists, and even the degree to which political factors are to blame for it. Many of the worst-affected states are in the south, a region that has had historically higher murder rates. And though crime may be a national political issue, in reality, local authorities such as mayors and police officials often have the most powerful roles in ensuring public safety.“I think it’s very difficult to put a partisan spin on this,” said Jeff Asher, a co-founder of AH Datalytics, which tracks criminal justice data. “I think that you can maybe say that places with state legislatures that are not focused on finding effective solutions to gun violence, you could place that blame on them. But generally … gun violence is local, and it’s usually local causes rather than statewide or federal causes.”Before Mississippi overtook it in 2019 and 2020, Louisiana led the nation in homicides per capita from 2000 to 2018, with its most populous city, New Orleans, ranking among the most murder-plagued in the nation. Asher, who lives in the city, blamed that on a range of factors, from the police department’s failure to solve many homicides to a lack of employment and educational opportunities there.And while Louisiana’s electoral votes have gone to Republicans in every election since 2000, it currently has a Democratic governor and was viewed as a blue state in the 1990s, as were many other southern states that are now considered Republican strongholds.“These issues were here in the 90s, when Louisiana was voting twice for Bill Clinton. These issues have not suddenly become issues,” Asher said.When Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety, looks at the states leading the country’s homicide rate, he sees a map reflecting loose gun laws. Firearms were used in almost 80% of homicides in 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, but in much of the south, state legislatures are controlled by Republicans who have in recent years made it easier to buy a gun, and carry it where one pleases.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When you’re seeing homicides rates going up, in 2020, for instance, that’s driven by gun homicides, that’s driven by easy access to firearms, predominantly by people who shouldn’t have access to firearms,” Suplina said. “And so, really, what you’re seeing in this study isn’t so much about politics or voting proclivities, but, rather, what states have strong gun laws and what states have weak ones.”Third Way’s study covers the 2000-2020 time period, during which the National Rifle Association pushed state lawmakers to remove or oppose regulations over firearm background checks, permitting and safe storage. Many states also have preemption laws on the books that prevent mayors from enacting tighter gun legislation within their city limits.And even when states pass stricter gun laws, they are easily skirted. “Our gun laws are only as strong as the weakest gun laws of a neighboring state,” Suplina said. “We have porous state borders in this country. And so in states like Illinois, and specifically with respect to Chicago, most of their crime guns are starting in Indiana and quickly making their way across the border.”There are signs that the pandemic-era wave of murders has crested. Statistics from AH Datalytics indicate murder rates in 90 US cities until the end of May have fallen by about 12% year on year, including in New York City, where Jordan convened a hearing of the judiciary committee into the city’s purported crime problem shortly after Bragg brought his charges against Trump.“If chairman Jordan truly cared about public safety, he could take a short drive to Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Akron or Toledo in his home state, instead of using taxpayer dollars to travel hundreds of miles out of his way,” Bragg’s office said in a statement before the hearing convened, referring to cities in Jordan’s home state that all have higher murder rates than New York. More

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When Donald Trump announced that he would be running for the presidency in 2024, millions of his devoted fans rallied to his cause. Once again, he finds himself way out in front in opinion polls of who Republican voters would choose to represent them in the 2024 presidential election. Joan E Greve tells Michael Safi that Donald Trump’s strongest opponent could be the US justice system. He’s been beset by legal strife as prosecutors hover and indictments pile up. He faces accusations that he illegally retained classified documents and obstructed justice. For a normal candidate in a normal presidential race the indictments would be enough to end a political career. But Trump has not only survived the episode, he is using it as part of his anti-establishment campaign. Meanwhile, the rest of the Republican field is faced with a dilemma: attack Trump and risk alienating his army of supporters, or try to soft-pedal the accusations and hope none of the scandal sticks to their campaigns. Whatever they appear to be trying, Trump remains hot favourite for the Republican nomination. More

From 5h agoSpeaking at the White House, Joe Biden condemned the supreme court’s conservative justices for their decision released today against race-based admissions.“In case after case, including recently, just a few years ago in 2016, the court has affirmed and reaffirmed this view that colleges could use race, not as a determining factor for admission, but as one of the factors among many in deciding who to admit,” the president said, adding that “the court once again walked away from decades of precedent.”“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” he said.There are “still a lot of really good Republicans” in the Senate, Joe Biden said during his interview on MSNBC.Biden said that six Republican senators have come to him since he was elected “to tell me, ‘Joe, I agree with you but if I’m seen doing it, I’ll lose a primary’”. He added:
I’m an eternal optimist. I still think there’s going to come a moment when they’re going to be able to break.
During his interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden admitted he knew his polling numbers “are not good” but argued that “they were the same way when I ran and won”.Biden said he had “great faith” in the American people and that it was “important that they know that my value set is very different than the new Maga Republican party”.He added:
Everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary. I got 80 million votes in the last election.
Here’s the clip:Joe Biden refused to say whether he knew ahead of time about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to march on Moscow.“Every president is amazed that America is the lead in the world”, he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.He said he had focused on holding Nato together and on expanding the alliance to make sure that “the most significant invasion since world war two does not succeed”.In an interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden was asked about a report that said senior officials at the justice department resisted investigating the possible involvement of Donald Trump and his associates in the January 6 Capitol attack.Biden said he had made a commitment that he would “not in any way interfere” with the justice department, adding that he had “not spoken one single time with the attorney general on any specific case”.He said he had “faith that the justice department will move in a direction that is consistent with the law”.Joe Biden has said the supreme court has “gone out of its way” to “unravel basic rights” following its ruling on Thursday to strike down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard.In an interview on MSNBC, Biden was asked what he meant at a press conference earlier today when he said the supreme court was “not a normal court”. He said:
What I meant by that is it has done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.
He said he found this court “so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.
Across the board, the vast majority of American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court has made.
Biden said that although he believes the conservative majority on the court “may do too much harm”, he opposes expanding the court because it will “politicize the court forever in a way that is not healthy”.Biden says he knows his polling numbers “are not good”, but argues that “they were the same way when I ran”.
Everybody thought I was going to get clobbered in a primary.
Biden says he’s “not spoken one single time” with the attorney general “on any specific case”.Biden says he thinks if we start the process of trying to expand the court “we’re going to politicize it in a way that’s not healthy”.Biden says he thinks it’s a “mistake” to expand the court. He says:
What I’ve done is I have appointed 136 judges, and … I picked people who are from various backgrounds.
We’ve appointed more women to the appellate courts, Black women to the appellate courts, than every other president in American history.
Biden says the vast majority of American people don’t agree with the supreme court’s ruling.He says it “finds it so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.Biden is asked what he meant when he said earlier today that the supreme court is “not a normal court”.Biden says the court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court”, pointing to its ruling last year to overturn Roe v Wade.Joe Biden will in a few minutes appear from MSNBC’s New York City studios for a live interview with anchor Nicolle Wallace.While Biden often responds to questions from reporters as he comes and goes from the White House or at the tail end of his speeches, he has done few press conferences compared with his recent predecessors, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Follow along here as the Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong covers the interview live. More

The US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions on Thursday. The court ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What was affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The removal of race consideration from college admissions could set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

A closed-door fundraiser for the very wealthy is a place where a lot of politicians really shine. Among their fellow elites, surrounded by people like them who like them – and are giving them money – Democrats and Republicans alike often become their truest selves. They drop the flesh-pressing affectations, the focused-group soundbites, the stiff smiles. They become something they’re usually not: honest.Honest is what Biden was at a similar fundraiser in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, this past Tuesday, when he told a crowd of his wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion “got it right”.Biden’s reassertion of his own discomfort with abortion came just three days after the first anniversary of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion right. In the year since women lost the constitutional right that the president says he is not “big on”, the bans that snapped into effect have had life-changing – life-ruining – effects for thousands.Women have been forced to carry for months babies that cannot live outside the womb, which they have had to watch die after agonizing moments or hours of life. Women and girls have been forced to flee their home states to get abortions after being impregnated through rape. Women have lost their organs to abortion bans, needing emergency hysterectomies to save their lives after incomplete miscarriages or cesarean scar pregnancies. Others have been drafted into exercises in morbid futility, forced to carry fetuses that lack major organs, such as heads, in a new reality that has been likened to torture. Other women have been forced to become sicker and sicker – suffering, risking their lives, and incurring permanent damage to their bodies in order to be made ill enough that abortion might become legally permissible.Many more women have been stripped of control over their lives – denied healthcare, denied the ability to plan their families, denied the freedom to choose the course of their own lives, for the sake of retrograde, bigoted and punitive conceptions of gender and sexuality held by others. And all American women, along with many trans people, have been degraded and humiliated by abortion bans, relegated to a lesser class of adult citizenship, informed that they are not permitted to control their own fates.The abortion data project WeCount suggests that there were 25,640 fewer legal abortions in America in the year following Dobbs. That number does not account for the number of women – the unlucky ones – who received care only after their pregnancies sickened them to the brink of death. And it doesn’t account for the women – the lucky ones, as these things go – who were able to flee their home states and subject themselves to the indignity and burden of traveling for care. So the number is conservative. But still, it represents a staggering injustice: 25,640 violations of human rights; 25,640 people who deserved better.Throughout the past year, members of the Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, have been largely absent from this unfolding catastrophe. They have not taken on an expansive view of executive authority in attempts to restore abortion rights; they have not pressed allies in Congress to advance pro-choice legislation; they have not been willing to challenge, even tentatively, an anti-choice federal judiciary that is wildly expanding its interpretations of its own power.They are not even willing to do the one thing that the president has the unquestioned authority to do: use the bully pulpit to express solidarity with American women, to grieve for their lost health, futures and dignity, and to rally Americans to the increasingly popular pro-choice cause. Joe Biden has abdicated leadership on abortion, the loss of which is causing untold suffering, and which will define life prospects for a generation of women. Because he finds it distasteful. Because he’s not “big on” it.Lest this seem like an ungenerous reading of a well-intended gaffe, it should be noted that an unwillingness to advocate for abortion rights has been a recurring theme of his career. Abortion is a test that Joe Biden has failed every single time that history has called him to it. His paeans to his Catholic faith as cover for his unwillingness to champion abortion also ring false: most American Catholics support abortion rights. And as Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, pointed out, the church also fiercely opposes marriage equality, which the president has long championed. It is not Catholicism that makes Joe Biden unwilling to issue a full-throated support of abortion rights. It is sexism.Until it became a political liability for him in the 2020 midterm cycle, Biden was among one of the last leading Democrats to support the Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision that forbade federal funding for abortions, and which, because of its ban on Medicaid coverage of the procedure, made Roe’s protection of the abortion right largely moot for poor women almost as soon as it was achieved. Biden’s assertion that “Roe got it right,” is both disingenuous to this long-held position, which curtailed Roe’s protections, and also a sign of how indifferent and uninterested he has been in the insights of pro-choice activists, who have long argued that Roe was insufficient in its protections for abortion, inadequate in its argument for the right on privacy, rather than liberty and equality, grounds, and too diminished by subsequent attacks on abortion access that were pursued by rabidly anti-choice Republicans and allowed by cowardly “pro-choice” Democrats who never had the courage of their campaign promises.But an indifference to abortion rights activists from Biden is no surprise: after the Dobbs decision, while his administration fumbled and tried to change the subject from their own incompetence and lack of preparation, it was not those who had conspired and schemed for decades against Roe who the Biden administration blamed, and it was not those who had snatched women’s rights away that they demonized. It was pro-choice activists.“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have consistently been out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party,” his then-communications director, Kate Bedingfield, sneered.Mission accomplished: pro-choice activists are not satisfied with Joe Biden. But abortion is a salient issue, one that is only growing more popular, and more electorally persuasive, every day. In light of the post-Dobbs political reality, Joe Biden’s unwillingness to give unqualified support to abortion rights is not just morally cowardly; it’s also politically irresponsible. Republicans are running from the issue, and the Biden campaign is declining to attack them on it. Voters are rallying around abortion rights, and the Biden campaign is declining to lead them.The time for apologetic, defensive, partial non-defenses of abortion rights is over, and America’s newly mobilized pro-choice majority knows it. It’s not the activists who are out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party. It’s Joe Biden.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

On Thursday, in a 6-3 decision, the US supreme court ruled against affirmative action in American colleges and universities. The obvious concern now is whether the ruling will significantly reduce the number of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students enrolled at elite institutions. But a more dire reality undergirds the court’s decision: it reflects a decades-long drive to return higher education to white, elite control.That movement predates affirmative action by at least a century, because no entity impacts American life more than higher education. During the Reconstruction era following emancipation, Black people were allowed to advance in political and various other roles, but white powerbrokers drew a hard line at higher education. On 28 September 1870 the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, John Newton Waddel, declared: “The university will continue to be, what it always has been, an institution exclusively for the education of the white race.”Waddel was not alone in his appraisal. Following the civil war, many white academic leaders and faculty members believed higher education was designed solely to educate white people. Waddel and other white academics maintained that the University of Mississippi’s faculty “never, for a moment, conceived it possible or proper that a Negro should be admitted to its classes, graduated with its honors, or presented with its diplomas”.Over the past century, Black Americans’ struggles to secure equal educational opportunity have always been met with white resistance. The recent lawsuits filed by Students for Fair Admissions – an organization led by anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum – against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are not about academic merit or even the mistreatment of white or Asian American students; they are an extension of this movement to ensure American higher education can be used to maintain social norms.This is why, in defending affirmative action, the argument for campus diversity falls short. Rather than make wealthy, majority-white campuses more diverse, affirmative action was intended to acknowledge and address the nation’s history of racism and atone for past racial harms that disproportionately affected descendants of enslaved Black people.This was made plain in 1963 – one of the most racially tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By summer, John F Kennedy – a Harvard University alumnus in his third year in the White House – was forced to take immediate action about racial segregation, in part because it had become a foreign policy embarrassment to the United States that belied the nation’s stated commitment to democracy.Kennedy sought assistance from many leading administrators in American higher education. “I write you personally to seek your help in solving the grave civil rights problems faced by this nation,” Kennedy wrote, on 12 July 1963, to select college presidents and chairs of trustee boards. “The leadership that you and your colleagues show in extending equal educational opportunity today will influence American life for decades to come.”Kennedy explained to academic leaders that the nation’s problems affected “both white and Negro students and their families”. He asked academic leaders to implement “special programs” to address said problems, but did not specify what the programs should be. He deferred to academic leaders to ensure initiatives were “carried out” toward that goal.Motivated by Kennedy’s appeal, Black and majority-white colleges and universities worked together to address racism. By October 1963, racial initiatives were discussed at meetings of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. In April 1964, presidents and faculty from Black campuses met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hosted a two-day conference on “Programs to Assist Predominately Negro Colleges and Universities”.The leaders of wealthy majority-white campuses committing to numerous programs, most of them focused on Black colleges and universities. The programs – supported by the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and other foundations – included new opportunities for Black college faculty to attend summer institutes and graduate schools and created exchange programs between faculty and students on Black and white campuses. Harlan H Hatcher, president of the University of Michigan, explained that his university’s partnership with the Tuskegee Institute “can help them in the development of a strong liberal arts program. They, in turn, will advise us on the [racial] programs.”For Michigan and its peer institutions, considering race in college admissions was part of a broad range of affirmative action practices launched in the 1960s. Affirmative action was a comprehensive set of programs that sought system-wide change to expand educational opportunity. The goal was not to ensure that some Black people could attend a few dozen of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, but instead that there be widespread investment in creating a more equitable higher education system – investing in the Black colleges and universities that long served the people most disenfranchised because of the nation’s history of racism.The blowback was immediate, however. By the 1970s, white academic leaders and foundation officers mostly abandoned their support of Black colleges and universities, and the lasting remnant of that era was racial consideration in admissions on select wealthy, majority-white campuses. That changed with the supreme court’s ruling this week.The ongoing racial backlash in this country extends beyond affirmative action. We’re witnessing a battle over ideology, and higher education is at the center. The efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; dismantle the faculty tenure system; restrict how aspects of Black history are taught; and withhold billions from Black universities are also part of this sinister movement. The movement limits Black presence, Black thought, and even Black control of Black institutions to return all of academia to white, elitist control. Those seeking control have no desire for higher education – the environment most concerned with solving complex problems – to have any role in redressing the legacy of racism.The dismissal of race and racism dialogue in higher education should alarm all Americans, because the supreme court decision is not about restricting unfair racial advantage in college admissions – it is about maintaining the social inequality that has long restricted most Americans, regardless of their race, while a few are allowed to preserve and maintain their privileged status in society. The result is a weakened university that does not solve racial problems but instead upholds them.
Eddie R Cole is an associate professor of education and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom More