{"id":9063,"date":"2023-07-27T13:53:02","date_gmt":"2023-07-27T13:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=9063"},"modified":"2023-07-27T13:53:02","modified_gmt":"2023-07-27T13:53:02","slug":"what-shall-we-do-with-chief-justice-roberts-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2023\/07\/27\/what-shall-we-do-with-chief-justice-roberts-cake\/","title":{"rendered":"What Shall We Do with Chief Justice Robert\u2019s Cake?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Understanding College Admissions in a Post Affirmative Action World<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

By Mallory Williams, MD, MPH, FACS, FICS, FCCP, FCCM<\/em><\/p>\n

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson in her dissent to the Supreme Court ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions Incorporated v. Harvard University and the University of North Carolina referred to Chief Justice Roberts\u2019 majority opinion as being formulated with a \u201clet them eat cake obliviousness\u201d concerning race.<\/p>\n

Her dissent is a masterful composition of the intersection of Supreme Court rulings and federal policy with resulting de facto second-class citizenship for black Americans. The power of her writing soars and her dissent is a tour de force in the legal history of the negative role the Supreme Court has played in creating a more equal society.\u00a0 But what are we to do now?\u00a0 What shall we do with Chief Justice Roberts\u2019 cake?<\/p>\n

The topic of Affirmative Action in America rightfully insights passions on all sides of the political spectrum.\u00a0 The most likely reason is one of distribution of opportunities.\u00a0 This fuels Americans.\u00a0 It is what makes our nation exceptional.\u00a0 However, the perception that one group will be considered special or preferred over another and therefore will receive opportunities even if both candidates are equally qualified has never been well accepted in this nation.<\/p>\n

But the irony is that the idea of having to choose an individual from a group of extremely well qualified finalists has always been a reality whether in the admissions committee or executive suite.\u00a0 The very concept of a well-designed selection process ensures that the final group of individuals to be considered are all exceptional and credible for the position.<\/p>\n

This means that every day in America a person is selected for a job where several other individuals are equally qualified.\u00a0 Or, otherwise said, many well qualified candidates for positions are turned away.\u00a0 For example, when Jack Welch conducted a six-year search for his successor at General Electric the finalist were three white men: \u00a0Jeffrey Immelt, Robert Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot from 2000 to 2007 and James McNerney, CEO of Boeing from 2005 to 2015.\u00a0 These were all very successful well-qualified executives.<\/p>\n

The question of who really was the most qualified can be debated well into the future. \u00a0Jeff Immelt emerged as the new CEO of General Electric.<\/p>\n

The question that remains for us as a nation is when and why do we really believe in the selection process?\u00a0 Do we believe in the selection process more when it involves athletes and legacies than when it addresses racial groups?\u00a0 Do we believe that all the applicants are well qualified to fill positions?\u00a0 These questions lay at the heart of how America feels and responds to affirmative action as a policy, particularly in college and university admissions.<\/p>\n

Even when America witnesses natural, financial, and health tragedies, like Katrina, the Wall Street meltdown from subprime lending, and the COVID 19 pandemic, where the nation is confronted with the consequences of long-term racial inequities, they still harbor anti-affirmative action sentiments.<\/p>\n

The term Affirmative Action comes from the 1935 Wagner Act.\u00a0 The Wagner Act allowed workers to unionize without fear of being discriminated against, and empowered a National Labor Relations Board to review potential cases of worker discrimination.\u00a0 In 1961, John F. Kennedy became the first President to utilize the term.\u00a0 He issued Executive Order<\/a>\u00a010925 which included a provision that government contractors \u201ctake affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The term simply meant to make intentional forward progress.\u00a0 What are the facts regarding Affirmative Action policy in college and university admissions?\u00a0 In the past sixty years,\u00a0women have surpassed men<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0earning four-year degrees<\/a>\u00a0while Black and Latino students are still underrepresented in college admissions and graduation rates, especially in four-year colleges.<\/p>\n

Just under seven percent of physicians in the United States identify as Hispanic, while 5.7 percent identify as Black or African American, and only 0.3 percent of physicians identify as American Indian or Alaska Native.\u00a0 However, if you look at the population, almost 20 percent of the U.S. population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, over 13 percent identify as Black or African American. And over 1.3 percent identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native.<\/p>\n

Since 2017, the number of matriculants to medical school from underrepresented groups declined by 16 percemt. This means that even in the setting of Affirmative Action policies in undergraduate and medical school admissions minority admission and graduation rates are still lagging.\u00a0 And when we examine successful black students, the data demonstrates that while only 8.5 percent of Black students attend Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs), 18 percent of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) bachelor\u2019s degrees are awarded by HBCUs.<\/p>\n

Of the top eight institutions that graduate black undergraduate students that go on to earn doctorates, seven are HBCUs.\u00a0 One third of all black students who have earned doctorates have graduated from HBCUs.\u00a0 So one third of black students who achieve doctorates owe their higher educational origins to HBCUs – institutions where the average enrolment of non-blacks is 25 percent<\/p>\n

Combined Hispanic and Black enrolment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is 18 percent and 26 percent at Harvard University, the subject institutions of the Supreme Court decision.\u00a0 HBCUs whose birth and mission is born out of American segregation are more or just as diverse as institutions that are 100 and 200 years older.<\/p>\n

It is important to understand Chief Justice Roberts has written in the court\u2019s opinion.\u00a0 It is just as important to understand the current environment in which the opinion is written.\u00a0 Most Americans do not favor Affirmative Action.\u00a0 In the Regents of the University of California Berkeley v. Bakke case, Justice Powell rejects most of the rationale given for the considerations of race by the university in their admission process.\u00a0 In fact, he states, \u201cracial and ethnic distinctions of any sort or inherently suspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Justice Powell accepts what he sees as a compelling goal \u2013 \u201cobtaining the interests that flow from a racially diverse student body.\u201d\u00a0 Justice Powell calls this a \u201cconstitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education.\u201d\u00a0 This legal rationalization was considered the \u201cTouchstone\u201d in race conscious admissions.<\/p>\n

However, Justice Powell\u2019s un-joined opinion surrounds his \u201cTouchstone\u201d with several guard rails.\u00a0 Race could only be considered \u201ca plus\u201d for an applicant, but could not be used solely to deny admission.\u00a0 Furthermore, the use of race had to be balanced with all other relevant elements of diversity within applicants.<\/p>\n

Chief Justice Roberts interprets Justice Lewis F. Powell\u2019s \u201cTouchstone\u201d standard very closely and seemingly rejects how others have applied it.\u00a0 Chief Justice Roberts relies heavily on Justice Powell\u2019s language critiquing the University of California Berkeley\u2019s admissions goal of \u201cremedying . . . the effects of \u2018societal discrimination\u2019\u201d as insufficient because it was \u201can amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, it cannot \u201cjustify a [racial] classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons . . . who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the [race-based] admissions program are thought to have suffered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instinctively, he, like Justice Powell, is suspicious of the broad rationale utilized to justify Affirmative Action and seeks to limit the scope of the policy.\u00a0 Justice Powell does not limit the scope by time, however, Chief Justice Roberts recites both Justice O\u2019Connor\u2019s 25-year legal limitations on the policy and Fisher II language which stated that they did not necessarily mean that going forward the\u00a0 \u201cthe University may rely on the same policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

He reinforces in his interpretation a time limitation requirement. \u00a0The architecture of the current court and law interpretation under contemporary conservatives will reject the rationale of a fair and just society as justification for Affirmative Action policy without end.\u00a0 Chief Justice Roberts\u2019 opinion stated that the goals of the admissions programs were not measurable and \u201cfail to articulate a meaningful connection between the means they employ and the goals they pursue.\u201d<\/p>\n

He rules that the admission programs are in violation of the Equal Protection Clause.\u00a0 Specifically, that they impose racial stereotyping and do not define an end point.\u00a0 Finally, he allows for the discussion of race only as a methodology for the applicant to detail how it has \u201caffected his or her life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chief Justice Roberts sees race as requiring a further explanation.\u00a0 And similar to Justice Powell he strikes an equivalency of race to other diverse elements of an individual.\u00a0 This is an illogical conclusion.\u00a0\u00a0 However, it may be seen as rational to most Americans.\u00a0 However it is illogical because there is no other immutable artificial barrier that is adjoined to legally sanctioned discrimination and torture in the history of American life that is more determinative of health and socioeconomic wellbeing in our society than race.<\/p>\n

To be Black in America unfortunately speaks for itself with regards to so many social, economic, political and health outcomes.\u00a0 In Chief Justice Roberts\u2019 America, history is not sufficient, the burden to inform the majority of the impact of race lies with the applicant or those yet to be college educated.\u00a0 The unconscious impacts of race on our college applicants therefore are not be considered.\u00a0 The impact of race that cannot be appropriately discussed by applicants by virtue of the individuals\u2019 limitations or understandings are therefore to be disregarded.<\/p>\n

The inability for the majority of non-diverse admissions committee members to understand the written realities of our minority students is not considered by the Chief Justice\u2019s opinion.\u00a0 To state that their race cannot be considered is to ignore that their race has always been considered and will never not be considered.\u00a0 It is to refer to an America as equally invisible as the Equal Protection Clause for most of Black people\u2019s existence.\u00a0 It is to in this critical moment call upon our nation\u2019s highest aspirations as though they already existed.<\/p>\n

The opinion will likely have at least two tremendous impacts:\u00a0 It will lower minority admissions at the nation\u2019s most competitive colleges and universities.\u00a0 This impact will be particularly harmful at state university professional schools.\u00a0 Because of this America\u2019s social, economic, and health disparities will widen.<\/p>\n

The strategy for minority college applicants going forward must be a significantly expanded process and the development of a portfolio that will allow for a successful recommendation after holistic review.\u00a0 The traditional athletic-artistic pathways that were heavily adjoined to race conscious admission strategies should be considered in doubt.\u00a0 The lack of emphasis or quality education on race at the high school level mixed with an all too common absence of emphasis on culture and blackness in our homes impedes our students\u2019 ability to engage in substantive discourse about how this complex construct impacts their lives.<\/p>\n

We have desperately and unrealistically wanted to be color blind.\u00a0 Not even Black presidents consistently discuss these matters to the full satisfaction of white Americans.\u00a0 Therefore, the readings of Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni and Cornel West must re-emerge in not only Jack and Jill and Key Club, but also in new organizations built to resist a post Affirmative Action America. \u00a0\u00a0And so the irony is that we may be forced by the Supreme Court using their flawed philosophical machinery, in which we all must be skeptical, to contemplate a color blind society.<\/p>\n

We are faced with a very simple proposition we are to not only to unmistakably be impacted by our race, but also our children must understand and successfully discuss why Race Matters<\/em>.\u00a0 Amidst this judicial tragedy if our children intelligently understanding their blackness is a result, then despite the horror of a Chief Justice who would lead the dismantlement of the democratic infrastructure for inclusion in our nation (without much of a remedy) \u00a0premised upon foundational law contaminated with the necessarily flawed opinions of the chosen few who serve inside this morally vacillating institution which has enshrined and insured inequality for most of its existence, I personally find no fault in him for this inadvertent but laudable outcome.<\/p>\n

But it is unforgivable though allowable to flaunt the self-serving opinions that creation of a more inclusive society fails the strict scrutiny test for the justification of Affirmative Action policy in America.\u00a0 The resulting conundrum that flows from this legal rationalization is not contemplated nor deeply considered in the arguments of those that author such opinions.\u00a0 How do we both equally prioritize and protect the historically victimized with the \u201cnon,\u201d less, and potentially future victimized and arrive at laws that support a viable democratic society, particularly from the position of having significant responsibility for the inequality at hand.<\/p>\n

The rather uncomfortable answer is, we must carefully measure and choose.\u00a0 And with time our considerations and choices change as our measurements do the same.\u00a0 We cannot all conveniently be equal under the law (and nowhere else in the consequential status of American society) through a 25 year a priori judicial fortune telling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Understanding College Admissions in a Post Affirmative Action World By Mallory Williams, MD, MPH, FACS, FICS, FCCP, FCCM Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson in her dissent to the Supreme Court ruling on the Students for Fair Admissions Incorporated v. Harvard University and the University of North Carolina referred to Chief Justice Roberts\u2019 majority opinion as being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,18],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[185],"class_list":["post-9063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-opinion","category-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9063"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9064,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9063\/revisions\/9064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9063"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=9063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}