Counterintuitively, Jeffrey Rosen argues that liberals should be happy about the Schuette ruling:
In cases like affirmative action bans, where citizens (including minority citizens) vigorously disagree about whether the policy in question are likely to harm minorities or help them, the conservatives held, the court should practice judicial restraint and defer to democratic decision making. Breyer didn’t need to hold his nose to support this. Far from it. He enthusiastically defended the importance of letting democratically accountable bodies decide whether affirmative action should be adopted or rejected. …
Liberal defenders of affirmative action should embrace Breyer’s reasoning, rather than reluctantly tolerating it. The framework provides a principled reason for criticizing conservatives when they resort to judicial activism to strike down state policies that permit affirmative action. As Breyer wrote: the Constitution “favors decisionmaking though the democratic process. Just as this principle strongly supports the right of the people, or their elected representatives, to adopt race-conscious policies for reasons of inclusion, so must it give them the right to vote not to do so.”
Richard Kahlenberg thinks race-based affirmative action is on its way out, which he says is a good thing:
In 2012, my colleague Halley Potter and I examined a number of states that had outlawed considering race in admissions, often by voter referendum. In addition to Michigan, these states include Arizona, California, Florida, Nebraska, Washington and others. Six states, we found, have spent money to create new partnerships with disadvantaged schools to improve the pipeline of low-income and minority students.
Eight states have provided new admissions preferences to low-income and working-class students of all races. Eight states have expanded financial-aid budgets to support the needs of economically disadvantaged students. In three states, individual universities have dropped legacy preferences for the generally privileged—and disproportionately white—children of alumni. In three states, colleges created policies to admit students who graduated at the top of their high-school classes. And in two states, stronger programs have been created to facilitate transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions.
How well have these programs done in promoting racial and ethnic diversity? In examining 10 leading public universities, we found that seven were able to maintain, or exceed, the proportion of African American and Latino students they had achieved through racial preferences in the past. So it can be done.
Frum also supports the “class, not race” argument:
Lyndon Johnson’s America was a country slashed by a color line of racial domination and subordination. Even the most affluent black citizen of the United States could expect to face humiliating economic and social discrimination. Meanwhile, the white majority overwhelmingly regarded itself as “middle class,” standing on a more or less equal footing with other “middle-class” whites.
Today’s America is a country whose class distinctions are growing as extreme as those in Edwardian England. Johnson’s assumption that non-black Americans all enjoyed more or less equivalent opportunities “to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities” seems poignantly out of date. A white skin may still correlate less with poverty than does a darker skin. But that skin alone long ago ceased to convey much in the way of privilege to the less affluent half of white America.
It’s true, even Oprah can encounter rude treatment in a Swiss boutique. Day in, day out, however, William Julius Wilson’s prediction has been vindicated and more than vindicated: In 21st-century America, class trumps race.
But Julianne Hing points out that class-based solutions don’t always help black students:
California, for one, has yet to recover from the disastrous impact of Proposition 209, the nation’s first statewide affirmative action ban, which state voters passed in 1996. Despite adopting aggressively class-based, race-neutral admissions policies to stay in line with Prop 209, the state’s flagship universities have not been able to return black student enrollment to their pre-1996 levels.
Today, California’s university system is educating an increasingly economically diverse but racially isolated crop of students. Roughly one-third of University of California undergrads qualify for federal Pell Grants, but in 2012-2013, black students made up just 2.4% of UC-Berkeley’s enrolled undergrads. African-Americans, meanwhile, make up about 6.6% of the state’s population. The economic workaround is not working alone.
The Dish 