From Draft NOtices, October-December 2023
— Lauren Reyna Morales
The 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court has delivered another catastrophic decision. On June 29, 2023, in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, the Court ruled that the race-conscious admission programs of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In an instant, the court ended nearly fifty years of affirmative action, “declaring that race cannot be a factor” (Associated Press) in procuring diversity in higher education settings because it violates a bedrock constitutional law. Chief Justice John Roberts stated that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.” Roberts and the other conservative judges position justice as “color-blind” to willfully ignore the sociological truths that are a consequence of the United States’ woefully inequitable past and present. Ending affirmative action will certainly result in reducing access to higher education for countless Black and brown students.
Roberts’ decision to kill race-based considerations for college admissions included an insidious caveat to continue the practice for U.S. military academies. The rationale offered to support this exemption is that military colleges and services academies have more “potentially distinct interests” (The Nation) than traditional universities and that continuing race-conscious admissions for these institutions is integral to maintaining national security. In other words, the Court ruled that actively promoting racial diversity is valuable to maintaining the U.S. military but not within academia and society itself. It is glaringly obvious that this caveat is another manipulative tactic to divert Black and brown youth from a path of their own choosing and into the armed forces (all military academy graduates are required to serve for at least five years upon graduating). Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted this inconsistency in her dissenting opinion, explaining that the Court has “come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom” (The Nation).
The Court’s decision has given the U.S. military the sharpest new tool to prey on minoritized youth. It’s hardly new business for the military to lure literal children and teenagers into their folds and the ending of affirmative action has a potential to spiral these efforts to a dangerous new level. Amidst an ongoing enlistment crisis, it is certain recruiters will aggressively court potential enlistees by portraying military service as the best viable option for their future. One can imagine them saying, “Maybe the university won’t accept you anymore, son, but the Army will. And if you make it out of this alive and fully functioning psychologically and physically, you might even get the big prize: a college education.” It is infuriating that the most destructive institution on the globe will directly capitalize on the failures of the government to provide young people with the basic opportunities they should be afforded in history’s wealthiest country. Education and societal survival should not be used as a bargaining chip.
By ending affirmative action, the U.S. Supreme Court has severely hindered access to an already exclusively priced ticket to a college education. And the exemption allowing the military to continue race-conscious admissions for military academies reveals blatant inconsistencies and imbalances. As The Nation editorializes, “If affirmative action benefits national security, then it makes no sense to consider affirmative action harmful or discriminatory in the less-life-or-death circumstances of college admissions.” This country doubles down on its commitment to disregard the rights of poor people and people of color when it openly codifies their exploitation in service to the interests of the empire and the wealthy.
Sources:
Associated Press: “Divided Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action” 6/29/2023
The Nation: “Affirmative Action, but Only for Military Academies,” 6/29/2023
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/).
