SCOTUS Rules Against Affirmative Action in 6-3 Decision

[Webster]

(The Guardian) Supreme court rules against affirmative action
The conservative-dominated supreme court has just ruled against race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, in a decision with major implications for affirmative action.

The vote in the two cases concerning affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions Inc v President & Fellows of Harvard College, broke down along the court’s partisan lines.

The six conservatives – chief justice John Roberts and associate justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett – voted for the decision striking down those schools’ race-conscious admissions policies, while the three liberals, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The nation’s highest court issued opinions in four cases, two of which concerned affirmative action, along with one over a trademark dispute and another about religious workplace accommodations.

A technical note about the decision in the affirmative action case: the court was considering race-conscious admissions policies at two colleges, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, but released their decision in one opinion. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her two liberal counterparts in dissenting in the North Carolina case, but had recused herself in the Harvard decision, and therefore filed no opinion.

 

[Daltonio]

Was surprised to read this earlier.
Next up let’s get rid of legacy admissions.

 

[Webster]

Next up let’s get rid of legacy admissions.

 

[Black Angel]

Hey guys, you'll never believe this but, I just found that shoe I was looking for yesterday.

It looks like it finally dropped, and while, I am not surprised, it is still disappointing..

Looks like there are going to be a lot of uncomfortable conversations at the dinner table.. particularly between the 53% of women who voted their conscience in 2016 and against the best interests of their daughters who will be affected by this ruling.

I say this because this was one of those policies that certain groups went after because they thought BIPOC would be affected the most, but, in all truth, it affects all, but as for the impact, it will be most noticeable among those who benefitted the most from this policy and it wasn't us, surprisingly enough, it was White women.

https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/


Since the 60s it was White women who benefitted the most from Affirmative Action, and not us and that was because after they aligned themselves (to get visibility for their cause) with Black people in the 60s who were fighting for their Civil Rights, they argued that feminism would benefit us all (and it does to a degree) and after we took up the mantle and aligned ourselves with them in their fight, since Black people have a tendency to ride for everyone, even and especially those who don't give a fuck about us (feminism in general has largely been centered around the White woman's struggle for equality against White men who had all the power and still do,) but they gaslit Black people, namely Black women, into believing that it was our fight too. This sowed division in the Black family, because Black men and women have always struggled together against racism, violence and the other hateful policies against us.. but this changed that after the 60s and mass-incarceration since then has exacerbated it. The Divide and Conquer strategy reveals its ugly head yet again.

So, after the alliance, they immediately centered themselves in the fight, and once we got AA passed together, and it became law, White women put away their picket signs, turned off their bullhorns, and walked away from us as we were still protesting for our rights, and then went home to prepare for the job interview they most certainly would not have gotten at the boys club company they previously applied for numerous times, but yet, for some reason, never got a call back until now. In a nutshell, after the White feminists got what they wanted (as a woman myself, I really can't blame them for not aspiring to be the broodmares their mother's and grandmothers were and wanted a life and career of their own instead.) they mostly abandoned the Civil Rights movement. But the issue here is that the ends didnt justify the means.

Yes, they helped get AA passed, but it was because it would benefit them too.. and once they got what they wanted, they literally abandoned us. Although, they did have a few notable spies in our movement to help with that.. Gloria Steinem was an informant.

It is why since then, while they have made tremendous strides in their quest for equality against White men, that we are still fighting for our rights today and it is still the same issues from the 60s and prior.. I mean you can go back and change the dates and names on the news papers and it will still be the same stories, especially, when it has been said that race relations today are worse than they were in the 60s and this is coming from the people (both Black and White) who were around back then. And then, once they got their power and wealth from their careers, and married someone equally successful and wealthy, and became a powerful and even wealthier voting block, they immediately started voting against the very things that benefitted them, and would do the same for future generations.. (in the same way that Clarence Thomas had closed just about every door that was left open for him by Thurgood Marshall) because they believed that it would hurt the very people who helped get them there.

And it will, but it will have a much bigger impact on them since they benefitted from it the most.. and the ironic thing is, that [the insecure, lap pinky owning] White men know that this is true and it was why they spent so much time, money and effort and fought so hard in trying to turn this back, because they didn't want to have to compete with women in the workforce (I remember when this was actually admitted on tv.. I think it was on FOX when I happened to be passing through.. I was stunned by the man's admission, and horrified by the men on the panel who laughed, but the women did not.. but I wasnt surprised..) and they didn't want to see them as equals anf respect them as such. They wanted to see their women under their thumb and at home having and raising the kids like their mothers and grandmothers before them. They didn't want women competing for the same jobs they did, or change the sexist culture that exists there, they wanted them to be back home, barefoot and pregnant. It seems like the only women they wanted in the workforce, was the sexy secretary who was willing to do anything, and anyone to advance her career.. and even in that regard, her career was not the intent for the men in that office.

Well, between this, and the Dobbs ruling last year, they are another step closer to that goal.. and while this ruling does put us closer to the 1960s, (and I know that is not the only goal, I mean some are already bitching that women can freely divorce them without asking for permission, women's voting rights and they are setting up the next fight against birth control and desegregated schools so they are laying the groundwork for these laws and others being overturned as well.)

That being said, I also know that this movement is largely in response to the freakout about that report that came out about them becoming a minority by 2050.. or whichever year it was said, (and 8 years of Obama..) Jane Elliot touched on this when she mentioned the "Birth Dearth." I say this because historically, whenever their appeared to be upward mobility of Black people in this country, White people have always responded with rage and sought to undo that progress.

Here are a few examples..

In Tulsa, Dick Rowland accidently tripping and grabbing Sarah Page (who never accused him, (and it was why I never mentioned her when I mentioned Carolyn Bryant and Fannie Taylor in the other thread) and it was alleged by the OK sheriff's office that they were dating) was just the ignition for the Tulsa Massacre, but the cause was the fact that Black people were able to band together and build their own cities and thrive in response to the racism and segregation they faced from White businesses.. and the fact that Black vets survived combat in WWI and came home.

White people were pulling our vets off the buses who (faced racist and other fucked up conditions in the military) came home after fighting for this country's continued freedom, and were lynching them for having survived the war. This was why many Black WW1 and WW2 vets stayed overseas after the war was over, because they learned about the horrors of what was going on at home. (This is also why, even though I was born in Germany because of my father's military service, that I actually have family in Germany today (this fact confused me as a kid lol..)

They are descendants of my ancestors who stayed after the war was over. And even though the Greenwood District in Tulsa was wealthy, it was still very poor compared to the poor White-only areas surrounding it. I read that the wealthy Black people who lived and worked there, had about 1/20th the wealth of the people who lived in the areas surrounding it. That is like you having $1,000 in cash, and then being mad that I have $50. And in either case, it didn't come from you.. I earned it myself.

This means that even though they didn't have a lot compared to the White people who lived there, that the White people still didnt want them to have the little they did have and they ended up taking that too. And so, with support from the police and military, The Greenwood district in Tulsa, became the first American city that would be destroyed by its own government, but it would not be the only one. And it wouldn't be the only Black Wall St. either. There are people who survived this, that are still alive today.

In fact, many of the cities that had massacres during the Red Summer of 1919 and after, were wealthy, self-sufficient Black cities.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation...-during-1919s-red-summer-are-being-remembered

Anyway, this is exactly what I mean when I say that anytime there has been any kind of social progress or upward mobility for Black people, White people have always sought to destroy that. Most of the cities that were destroyed during the race massacres that occured here, weren't because of whatever lie the White woman said at the time and caused it, it was because the White people were jealous of the Black people in these areas, or didn't want them to be able to vote, or join a union, or have anything really.. and so, they banned together and destroyed our cities and lives for that reason.

The women who started these events, later said in court that they lied. Fannie Taylor was one of them and she was trying to cover up an ongoing affair. Her lover beat her to a pulp and she told her husband that a Black man did it, and the end result was the Rosewood Massacre. Like Tulsa, it too was a self-sufficient, successful Black city and it, like many others was destroyed over a lie. Though Tulsa was destroyed too, and included in the racial massacres that destroyed our cities, Sarah Page had always said that Rowland didn't touch her.. so it was someone else's lie that escalated this.

Another example is the fact that I just recently learned that the only reason the SATs were invented, was because there was too many Black people getting into college. I learned this after looking into it when I saw a question about if the SATs were racist, and I was curious and read up on it. I also learned that the citywide tests I took and aced as a kid were subject to the same criticism.

And just as Black people were fighting for their Civil Rights and equality in the 1960s, White people were putting up Confederate flags and statutes to commemorate those who raped, lynched and terrified us. This was done even in states that weren't part of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and didn't exist until much, much later after both it and the Emancipation Proclamation. (Quite frankly, as someone who is a descendant of a lot of these people, I have no idea why any of them would be proud of them. I mean it would be like being a proud descendant of King Leopold II and putting up a statue to celebrate him even though he killed and butchered nearly 13 million of innnocent Congolese people.)

And lastly, who was elected after 8 years of our first Black president? The son of a Nazi who got arrested at a Klan riot. This was after at least 10 years of the Obama family being subject to the kind of horrendous racial abuse that you'd only read about in a textbook. And the thing is, these people thoroughly excoriated him and his family, and they still do to this day.. and though he self-identifies as Black, his mother was White making him biracial. There was a report that came out sometime after the 2016 Election that White people largely voted for Trump, because they saw the successes of Black and POC around them, and felt like they were losing their power.. and thought that Trump would save them. Economic anxiety was bullshit from the get-go.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html

And if we look back in history, we can see that that was always the case.

Even LBJ once said, "If you can convince the lowest White man, he's better than the best Colored man, he won't notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets to you."

And that is exactly what is going on here. It is as true today, as it was back then. And Trump took full advantage of this sad fact.

And each of the Black cities destroyed before, during and after the Red Summer of 1919 had the same goal in mind.

More on this here. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/t-town-red-summer-racist-mobs/)

To limit the upward mobility of Black people, and it has been their same goal for the other non-white groups in this country, which is why their history has been banned or white-washed too.
It started with both the Natives and the Mexicans and now it is happening to Black, Jewish and now LGBT+ history too. How bad does your history have to be that you want to ban other people from learning the truth? It's bad enough that you bury your own heads and try your best to ignore your own history, but now you want to prevent other people from learning it too.. I mean I always knew that the history we were taught in school was white-washed bullshit.. but now, even that has been banned or further white-washed than it is already.

Anyway this entire freakout, over becoming a minority is in vain. The last Census saw like a 40% increase in the number of people who identified as Colored and on previous Census's they were considered White. I am guessing that these people have an Ancestry.com account too. White people have always been in the minority on a global scale, and in the interest of keeping their numbers up, they allowed other historically non-white groups to become White as a condition of both skin color and wealth.

The Italians weren't considered White until after WW2, the Irish actually had their status since the first Census was taken in 1790. And, if you were Black, and were extremely wealthy, you could be legally reclassed as White too, as was the case with Sarah Rector. The Black girl who was legally classified as White because her property had oil, without that classification, she would not have been able to do so. Today, most self-identified White people in this country, are actually Latino and Arabs have been considered White since 1944. And there are a lot of White people in the South, who have Black heritage. So basically, it is a numbers game with movable goalposts.

The irony here is in the fact that even though Black Americans have a substantial percentage of European heritage, they are not allowed to identify as White per the One Drop Rule.. and to survive, they had to pass for White and alter their appearance when doing so. I recently found out that in addition to having Scottish, Welsh and English in my background via Slavery, I am also Irish too, and they weren't slaves, but indentured servants and often worked the same plantations as my enslaved ancestors but were then freed once they paid off their debt. My Irish ancestors were indentured and I traced them all the way back to the 1200s, (I paused my genealogical research because I moved but I'll start back on it eventually) and their descendants here, were from the same part of NC as my Black and Native ancestors were..) it was a very good thing that the Europeans wrote everything down, good and bad, as I have gotten a lot of info from the books written by my ancestors and found the records for my non-white ancestors as a result.

This is also why there are a lot less White people then you think because some of your mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers, et. al, passed for White and took the secret to their grave out of fear. There are numerous documentaries and old movies on this subject and they are fascinating. (I am using "you" innocuously and am not referring to anyone specifically, just as I have all throughout this post.)

The birth rates among this demographic are getting lower (though the crazies will swear up and down that it was because of genocide, when it is not, (believe it or not, hate does kill) but it is really because they both have kids with other people and contribute to the growing and beautiful diversity in the world.. there are many noted White supremacists, who have biracial children with Black women that they married.. so it isn't just from Slavery..) and that they fear that they are losing their power and status, and all of these rulings have reflected that, but it is already too late. These rulings won't change this one bit and it will only hurt those who had the most to gain from it.

So, as unsurprising and disappointing as this ruling is, this should be filed under the consequences of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

Anyway, I agree that legacy based admissions should be abolished as well, but it wont be, because it wasn't a policy put in place for our benefit, and it is extremely beneficial to the mediocrity that rely on it.. (like the wealthy and celebs..)

 

[Webster]

(The Guardian) Yesterday, the supreme court’s conservatives banded together to strike down race-conscious admissions at universities. It’s too soon to say how colleges nationwide will react to their ruling, but the Guardian’s Edwin Rios reports that if the experience of two major universities is any indication, the decision could mean much fewer Black and Indigenous American students in student bodies: The supreme court’s decision to strike down race-consciousness in college admissions will upend the academic landscape for millions of people. But students in nine states already live in a post-affirmative action world.

In 1996, Californians voted to ban race-conscious affirmative action policies in the state’s public universities. Since then, eight other states – Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington – have also barred race-based considerations, often through ballot initiatives approved by the states’ voters. Some universities in these states report that the bans have made it significantly harder to achieve racial diversity on their campuses.

The University of California and the University of Michigan, whose representatives submitted arguments to the supreme court in support of race-conscious admissions, are two such schools. In the years since Michigan voters ended affirmative action in 2006, for instance, the number of Black and Indigenous American students at the University of Michigan has plummeted. The same happened at UC Berkeley and UCLA after voters approved a ban in 1996. And despite developing numerous strategies to supplement the lack of affirmative action policies with other outreach tactics, the representatives wrote, their efforts have failed.

 

[Black Angel]

I honestly wonder how HBCUs will response to this.. as it is in some of them, the student body looks no different than a PWI..

 

[Webster]

I honestly wonder how HBCUs will response to this..

As far as I know, this shouldn't affect them; if anything, if I were an Asian student looking for good options for college, I'd seriously consider an HBCU because most of them are very comparable in terms of education to non-HBCU's.

 

[Black Angel]

Right. But tuition is so damned expensive.. and I have always wanted to go to an HBCU myself.. but I am not sure if there are any up here..

And I read that it wasn't Asians who complained.. it was 3 White men and an Asian man used as a prop. I read that Asians didnt have a issue with this policy because they benefitted from it too and there were stats thst showed that schools and businesses that had a diverse body performed better than those that didn't.

I also read that the same person is involved in all of these SCOTUS rulings as of late, and he was the same person who funded Abbie Fisher's failed campaign.

And the fact that certain people are encouraging young women to forgo her dreams, education and career to be some incels "tradwife" is not lost on me..

Especially when those same people are alao complaining about women being able to divorce without permission, vote, obtain birth control and desegregated schools.

These too are an attempt at reinstituting slavery.. they aren't happy with the wage, prison, child and debtvslavery most undocumented workers, the incarcerated, children (in certain states) and people in general are subject to, so now they are moving on to reenslaving their wives or future victims too as well. Their endgame is a clear as crystal.

 

[Webster]

I also read that the same person is involved in all of these SCOTUS rulings as of late, and he was the same person who funded Abbie Fisher's failed campaign.

Oh you mean that little worm Edward Blum?
That's the one.

 

[Webster]

These too are an attempt at reinstituting slavery.. they aren't happy with the wage, prison, child and debtvslavery most undocumented workers, the incarcerated, children (in certain states) and people in general are subject to, so now they are moving on to reenslaving their wives or future victims too as well. Their endgame is a clear as crystal.

600-700k American soldiers didn't die during the Civil War for that to return and there's millions of Americans, myself included, who'll fight their asses off to make sure everyone, as I like to say, has an equal shot at the table of American equality....especially given everything that's happened over the past decade. I mean, if we were headed back to slave times, do you seriously believe Congress would've ordered DoD to change the names of all those military bases? (FWIW, they should've never named them for Confederate traitors in the first place, but that's just me.)

 

[Black Angel]

I mean, if we were headed back to slave times, do you seriously believe Congress would've ordered DoD to change the names of all those military bases? (FWIW, they should've never named them for Confederate traitors in the first place, but that's just me.)

It is always easier to do things gradually than abruptly.

The reason everyone is rebuking Trump now, is because he was too obvious about what his party was trying to do. And he is a boisterous idiot. So he drew attention to a lot of the stuff that his handlers wanted to keep in the dark, and because he is who he is, it was like shining a spotlight brighter than the Sun onto the man behind the curtain. Which conservatives obviously didn't like.

We are already headed back to those times. This started in the 60s. In response to the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war and feminism protests, civics are no longer taught to the extent they were in the 60s.

Why do you think that education is in decline now? More than half the country can't read beyond a 6th grade level.. and it is getting worse. And we seem to be A-OK with that. No Child Left Behind helped with this.

This is because an educated population is unfit for enslavement.

It has been said that if you educate a man, you liberate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you liberate an entire nation. The nations that allow their women to be educated are more successful than ones that don't. This country has been on the decline for years where that is concerned. Hell, even the books that you and I likely read as kids that taught critical thinking have been banned.

Think about what it was like for women in the 60s. They were unemployed, uneducated, unable to do anything without their husband's permission, and their husband's often used their wives as punching bags.

These women were not allowed to have bank accounts or credit cards without their husband's permission. Do you think that knowing what we do about what life was like for women back then, that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were happy under those circumstances? If you were to put yourself in their shoes during those times, would you be happy? Even today, women are encouraged not to get their tubes tied on the off-chance that they may find, fall in love with and marry a magical penis that will miraculously make them change their mind.

I got the same bullshit myself from my ob/gyn when I asked her about my options if I got a hysterectomy because my cycles were so heavy and so long that they were making me dangerously anemic. Keep in mind that outside of the lead poisoning I mentioned elsewhere that had as a kid, I also had iron issues as a baby in Germany.. so knowing this history, any iron issues I would have as an adult would be very concerning. My other Drs thought I was dying.. and didn't know why and they recommended that I talk to my ob/gyn about it. My husband was fully supportive of any decision I would make because he loves me and wants to make sure that I am alive and healthy to live as long as possible.. and if that meant a future with no children then so be it.

The D&C procedure I went through at my ob/gyn's office would have not been allowed after the Dobbs ruling.. even though I wasn't pregnant. If I had a Dr. as asinine as these "religious" doctors and pharmacists are, and they denied my procedure, and medication I would be dead today.

My ob/gyn told me that due to my age at that time, that she would not recommend the hysterectomy, even AFTER she performed a D&C on me because of my condition and knowing that my husband (then boyfriend) was very supportive. Under those circumstances, I'd have no choice because Drs were disappearing left and right when the ACA became law. I had better coverage and Dr options on the shitty medicaid I had when taking care of my great-grandmother than I did on my husband's employee issued insurance. Which, even though they played ball with the ACA it was still expensive. What we paid, would be about 80% of our current mortgage. I really have no idea how we afforded that for a decades and with YEARLY increases. I really don't.

When all of these rulings came down, you gotta sit back and really ask yourself, who benefits the most from these rulings against:

1. Equality and diversity initiatives in the work place and academia

2. Elevating the students that are performing better than their peers

3. Things that help the environment (who owns the biggest polluting companies on the planet)

4. The students who don't want to be subject to overbearing, predatory loans

5. Abortion even in cases of rape, incest, danger to the mothers life (it is mostly wives and mothers who undergo abortion, not single women, who mostly go for free contraception and breast cancer screenings..)

6. Learning the true history of this country and how it has treated the people who actually built it, and not the white-washed bullshit that fellates White people and banned the histories of Native, Black, Mexican, Jewish, LGBT+ etc. and/or anything else that tells the truth about this nations true history.

7. Books that teach critical thinking

8. Gun control policies that most Americans support

9. Policies that allow the marginalized groups a fair shot at equity as well as equality

10. Teaching sex ed, and about consent and helping victims recognize when they have been abused.. and what they should do if/when it happens

11. The reigning in of the police who frequently and flagrantly abuse their power, and have complete immunity to continue doing so, since SCOTUS has ruled at least 3x since 1985 that the police have no legal obligation to protect the people?

We literally pay their salaries with our taxes, moreso by the groups abused the most by them which is Black and other PoC.. and the undocumented and they also pay the most in taxes, and get the least return for doing so. If we pay their salaries, and they don't have to protect us and are free to abuse us whener they see fit and they can escape the consequences with qualified immunity, then why do we need them? It has already been shown that they dont prevent crime either.. and there are a shit ton of pedophiles and rapists on the force too..

So ask your yourself, who truly stands to benefit from all of these things in place?

Here is a hint. When the cops do bad, and on the rare occasion that they are held accountable, one of the first things they do is make sure that the jury panel has as many of this demographic as possible, because it increases the likelihood of that cop getting off scot-free.

It's not Black, Native, Asian, Mexican, LGBT+ or other marginalized people, and it sure as hell isn't kids, it isn't women either, even though it was the 53% in 2016 that voted for this because they knew that while it was bad for them, that it would mostly hurt other people too. They are ok with their proximity to power on this because while it hurts them, it hurts the other people much more.

This is why this country really isnt as divided as they say it is, because most people here have more in common with each other politically than not. But when you have and entire culture and is in a cult (one that is killing them too) that is predicated on looking down on others, and their own warped perception of being better than everyone else and them willing to buy into that (both literally and figuratively speaking) instead of just trying to be better people themselves, then it makes the return of the things we think are impossible, actually very possible. These people would rather burn down the entire country that they didn't build, than share it with those who did.