VICTOR JOECKS: To defend affirmative action, left flirts with racism

It’s amazing how racist many leftists sound when they defend affirmative action.

Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard and the University of North Carolina engaged in racial discrimination against Asian applicants.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote while declaring affirmative action unconstitutional.

The decision means that America is closer to realizing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of judging people based on their character, not their skin color. That’s worth celebrating. Democrats don’t see it that way.

The court denies “young people seeking an education equal opportunity,” Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., said.

What doublespeak. By forbidding colleges to judge applicants by their skin color, Horsford claims would-be students won’t have an equal opportunity to seek an education.

“Institutions of power like the Supreme Court should be working to reduce these (racial) disparities,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said.

This statement is quite insightful into the leftist worldview. Notice the disregard for the separation of powers. The Supreme Court’s job is to uphold the Constitution. The legislative branch is supposed to pass constitutional laws to achieve policy outcomes. Democrats want the court to expand its purview to impose the left’s preferred policy outcomes. Talk about a threat to democracy.

“The ruling purports that colorblindness will end racism, but as Judge (Ketanji Brown) Jackson writes in her dissent, proceeding in forced ignorance of racial disparities simply allows those disparities to thrive in America,” Ford said.

First, he twists Roberts’ argument, which is that ending racism requires the law be colorblind. Now, look at the rest of his statement. Ford and many on the left claim that affirmative action is necessary to end racial disparities in outcomes.

Such disparities exist and are obvious in education. In 2020, 43 percent of those scoring above 700 on the math SAT were Asian. Just 1 percent were black. Forty-five percent were white, and 6 percent Hispanic.

The question is why? The racist claims that Black and Hispanic students are inferior. That’s a garbage opinion.

Those on the left, as seen in Ford’s statement, believe that Black and Hispanic students are equal but are held back by forces beyond their control — racism embedded in the system. There is indeed systemic racism in America’s past. Slavery and Jim Crow are proof of that. But they’re illegal now. So is discrimination in hiring. For decades, affirmative action tilted the playing field to make up for these wrongs.

What Ford is implying is that Black and Hispanic students can’t compete on an equal playing field. That’s one-step away from overt bigotry.

There’s a third explanation. People are individuals, not interchangeable widgets you can group according to skin color. It’s statistical and logical nonsense to divide people based on one variable and expect all other characteristics to be proportional. Many factors, including single motherhood, family wealth, culture and individual choices, influence outcomes.

Change those, and outcomes shift. For instance, public schools do a terrible job of educating African American youngsters. But Black students have thrived in more demanding charter schools and with school choice. Shamefully, the Democrats who bemoan systemic racism largely oppose those reforms.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.