Ever since he attained the age of majority some four decades ago, Terence Hamilton, now 57, has voted in Mississippi’s Second Congressional District, covering 30 counties across the western part of the state. First drawn in 1986 to comply with the Voting Rights Act, the district’s scope has shifted somewhat over the years. But the bottom line has been a majority-black district in a state where African Americans comprise 38% of the population.

Like many of his black neighbors, Hamilton has reliably backed the district’s incumbent US representative, Democrat Bennie Thompson, who’s held his seat since 1993. But the US Supreme Court has now disrupted the pattern, holding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t require states to draw majority-minority districts like Hamilton’s. In response, Mississippi Republicans have rushed to redraw the state’s electoral map in a manner that is certain to dilute black votes.

They’re doing this, of course, in the name of colorblindness.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,000 miles away, Ethan Chen, aged 18, is preparing to attend Georgetown University, not far from his family’s home in Bethesda, Md. It is a bittersweet transition for Chen, who had always considered Georgetown a “safety school.” His dream was to attend either Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools. But during the winter and spring, he received one rejection letter after another, despite a perfect grade-point average and equally impressive test scores.

How did this come to be, after another high-court ruling that barred colleges from discriminating against white and Asian applicants in the name of “affirmative action”? Chen, of course, will never know what exactly went into admissions officers’ decisions to reject him. What he does know is that many schools have continued to use essays and other “soft” factors to practice affirmative action and racecraft under another name.

The college officials, too, claim to uphold colorblind justice.

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How AI will change society

By Glenn Loury

These two stories — based on composite characters — illustrate the paradox of race and colorblind justice 250 years since the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” The two recent Supreme Court decisions — on affirmative action and on voting rights — have clarified something profound about American public life. They reveal that two-and-a-half centuries since the Founding, we are trying simultaneously to transcend race and to manage its consequences and even “win” on racial terms. These ambitions pull against one another, suggesting that race will continue to indelibly stamp the American experience.

Consider the parallel nature of the two decisions. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, decided in 2023, the Supremes prohibited universities from explicitly using race in admissions. In Louisiana v. Callais, they sharply constrained the use of race in congressional redistricting under the VRA. On the surface, both decisions advance the same constitutional ideal of “colorblindness”: government should treat citizens without regard to race. Yet in practice, both rulings immediately generated what one might call a politics of proxies.

Universities didn’t abandon the pursuit of racial diversity after the high court proscribed affirmative action. Rather, university leaders shifted emphasis toward other considerations, some of which are strongly correlated with race: economic hardship, neighborhood disadvantage, first-generation status, personal adversity, and essays narrating the experience of marginalization. Formally speaking, these are race-neutral criteria. But everyone understands that they may also function as indirect means of sustaining black and Hispanic representation at selective institutions, as they appear to be doing.

Meanwhile, in the voting-rights context, a similar proxy logic holds. Red states attacking minority-majority districts increasingly invoke race-neutral partisanship, rather than race, as the guiding principle of line-drawing. Since black voters in much of the South overwhelmingly support Democrats, partisan gerrymanders often produce substantial racial consequences without having to explicitly classify voters by race.

The symmetry is striking. In both cases, non-racial instruments are being employed that have predictable racial effects. But political partisans see the cases differently. Conservatives who object to universities using race-correlated proxies to preserve minority enrollment often defend partisan districting as constitutionally neutral. Meanwhile, liberals defend “holistic” admissions criteria as part of a legitimate effort to broaden opportunity. This, even as the Left often condemns partisan gerrymanders precisely because their racial effects are foreseeable. Both sides, in other words, alternate between formal and substantive understandings of equality depending on context, thus illustrating what I call the colorblindness paradox.

This suggests that the stakes are deeper than ordinary partisan inconsistency. The real problem lies in the incoherence of colorblindness itself when race remains deeply embedded in the social structure. For decades, the Supreme Court has increasingly embraced a view of the Constitution that is suspicious of racial classification. The central danger, in this account, is the government sorting citizens by race and allocating benefits and burdens on that basis. This principle — suspicion of government racecraft, even when it’s used for “positive” or non-invidious reasons — dominates the high court’s equal-protection jurisprudence. Rightly so, in my view.

But implementing that principle is another matter altogether. The difficulty here is that race in America remains highly correlated with countless other variables that public institutions may legitimately consider when allocating scarce benefits or opportunities. Educational attainment, neighborhood quality, wealth, family structure, social networks, geography, and partisan affiliation — all continue to bear the imprint of racial history. And they all are relevant when exercising the government’s discretionary powers.

As a result, banning explicit racial classification needn’t preclude racially differentiated outcomes. It merely changes the mechanisms through which those outcomes are pursued — or avoided. The colorblindness principle provides little guidance here. This is why our public arguments about colorblindness increasingly revolve around debates over the use of proxies.

Take college admissions. If a university gives special weight to applicants who overcame severe educational disadvantage, is it pursuing a morally defensible concern for human development? Or is it covertly pursuing racial “balancing”? The answer isn’t obvious, since the non-racial criteria that serve as proxies for race are themselves neither arbitrary nor irrelevant. Educational disadvantages are real. Unequal access to stable schools, family resources, mentoring networks, and social capital is real. Moreover, non-racial criteria that correlate with race may genuinely identify talented students (of all races) whose capacities were developed under adverse conditions. Thus, it is legitimate for an admissions process to consider them.

But such consideration also predictably shapes the racial composition of entering classes, and it is plausible to suspect that this is precisely why some institutions are using them more heavily now than before the 2023 anti-affirmative-action ruling. If so, those institutions are violating the spirit if not the letter of the court’s holding, as Chen in our narrative learned to his chagrin.

Or consider redistricting. A legislature produces a map to maximize Republican advantage, knowing that such a map will reduce black electoral concentration. Is this merely ordinary political hardball with unfortunate racial side effects? Or is it something uglier — partisanship masquerading as a cover story for anti-black animus? Again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Political affiliation is itself a legitimate organizing principle in democratic politics. Yet in a society in which race and party remain so tightly aligned in some regions, the distinction between partisan and racial intent is hard to discern.

The difficulty here is that, while the court can forbid the explicit consideration of race, it can’t forbid the use of statistical signals that correlate with racial identity. Everything turns on the motivations of officialdom, which aren’t easy to determine.

This points toward a deeper conceptual confusion in our racial discourse, which arises from our conflating two very different ideas: racial blindness and racial indifference. A society may prohibit explicit racial classification while remaining intensely concerned with racial outcomes, embracing blindness while rejecting indifference. Indeed, that is precisely our current situation. Universities remain deeply invested in racial diversity even after affirmative action. Voting-rights advocates remain deeply invested in preserving black political representation even after the court’s retrenchment. The disappearance of explicit racial language hasn’t produced indifference to racial disparities. It has simply displaced racial management, and racial politicking, into more indirect forms. This distinction matters, because it exposes the limits of purely procedural solutions to racial inequality.

I have spent much of my professional life arguing that durable inequality isn’t sustained merely by discriminatory transactions at the point of selection. It is sustained through differences in social development — differences in the networks, norms, institutions, and cultural practices through which human capacities are formed. Opportunity travels along the synapses of social networks. Human-capital formation depends upon family stability, educational culture, neighborhood order, mentoring relationships, and access to trusted institutional pathways. These developmental processes unfold long before a university admissions office reviews an application or a legislature draws district boundaries. And racial identity figures prominently in these processes of social development in the United States.

This is why legal and administrative efforts to engineer proportional representation at the endpoint often feel unsatisfying. They attempt to correct downstream disparities via anti-white “reverse discrimination,” which the Supreme Court now decries, while leaving untouched the upstream developmental inequalities from which those disparities partly emerge.

And there is another drawback to the method. Formal neutrality can itself become morally evasive if it ignores the historical conditions that continue to shape social outcomes. A society can’t simply declare itself colorblind and thereby escape the consequences of its past. The legacy of racial exclusion remains embedded in institutions and inherited patterns of advantage and disadvantage. The Terence Hamilton in our opening narrative might be the great grandson of a slave and the son of a father who endured de jure racial apartheid. Those historical realities and their consequences don’t disappear the second a court in Washington holds them irrelevant.

Thus our predicament: the paradox of colorblindness. On the one hand, permanent racial management threatens to entrench precisely the kind of group consciousness that a liberal democracy ought to transcend. A political culture organized around endless racial accounting risks weakening common citizenship. The more every institutional disparity is interpreted through the lens of racial representation, the harder it becomes to encounter one another simply as fellow citizens. On the other hand, abstract invocations of neutrality may fail to reckon adequately with the developmental realities that shape unequal outcomes in the first place.

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We are all Eurasians now

By Anatol Lieven

America oscillates between these two poles because we seek both transcendence and remediation. We wish to become a society in which race no longer governs public life. Yet we also seek to offset the stubborn consequences of racial history. These goals aren’t fully compatible.

Indeed, the deeper paradox may be this: the more persistently racial disparities remain visible, the harder it becomes to sustain genuine colorblindness. But the more aggressively institutions organize themselves around racial outcomes, the harder it becomes to achieve a society in which race recedes in civic importance. No constitutional doctrine can fully resolve this tension, because it doesn’t arise merely from law. It arises from the unfinished social condition of the nation itself.

I supported affirmative action many years ago because I regarded it as a temporary bridge across inequalities inherited from Jim Crow. I remain sympathetic to the moral impulse behind such policies. But over time, I have grown skeptical that endless procedural adjustment at the point of selection can substitute for the harder work of social development. Nor do I believe that a healthy republic can indefinitely sustain a politics in which every important institution is expected to produce racially calibrated outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s recent interventions are therefore both understandable and welcome, but they are also incomplete. They reflect an effort to limit explicit racial administration in public life. Yet they can’t eliminate the underlying realities that make proxy politics inevitable, and inscrutable, in the first place.

For that reason, the real challenge before us isn’t simply legal. It is civic and developmental. If we want a politics in which race matters less, then we must build a society in which the capacities required for flourishing are more broadly and deeply cultivated across all communities. No amount of doctrinal refinement can spare us that obligation.

The paradoxes will remain. But 250 years after a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson penned his majestic words, perhaps we can at least begin speaking about them honestly. Indifference to the roots of racial inequality is actually inconsistent with achieving colorblindness in the conduct of our public affairs.

There are reasons to wonder if these poles, and much else in the Rockefeller Wing, should be on Fifth Avenue. But here they are. And wandering through the halls recently, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window-walls, I realized how badly I had missed them for the last four years — while all of this was closed for renovations. When I first entered the southmost part of the room, where the bis poles used to stand, and they weren’t there, I panicked for a moment. Had they been… repatriated? I accepted that if so, it was probably quite correct. But I felt depressed. I sidled up to a guard in big shoes, and asked if there wasn’t some stuff missing in this room. He said no, that stuff was now next door.

Sure enough. Standing there beneath these human trees, strangely relieved, I was suddenly struck by the sense that the room in which I was standing — each elegantly balanced case and each careful label — delivered a precisely aimed punch in the nose for our moment, a wake-up slap for this bad dream.

After all, we in the US — as well as folks in the UK and Europe — are in the throes of intense conflict concerning “diversity”. In recent years, a longstanding and broadly operational national consensus around affirmative action policies (aimed at addressing legacies of racial and gender discrimination) has cracked rapidly into hostile camps: on the one hand, defenders of DEI policies and progressive identity politics; on the other, defenders of the “Enlightenment ideal” of free and equal persons judged on their substantive merits, without reference to sex or skin color. Each side accuses the other of bad faith, in addition to bad ideas. If it’s diversity you want, say MAGA pundits, how about we get some Republicans into your philosophy department? If you hate non-white people, counter the Brooklyn socialists, why not just say so, instead of pretending that you care about free speech?

Meanwhile, the Asmat bis poles look on, and they must be laughing hard in their woody cores: “Diversity?” one can hear them thinking, “How dare these cretinous buffoons babble on about diversity!”

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Big Tech has stolen our children

By Matt Feeney

After all, those looming funeral pylons, together with all the other majestic Melanesian artifacts around them, which hail from hundreds of totally diverse cultures, can see clearly the truth to which we are mostly blind: our world, the world of modern America and much of what lies beyond these shores, is, at this point, almost perfectly monolithic. Big picture, we all share one simple cosmology. Call it the “moneyworld”.

I know what you’re thinking: “That can’t be right! Look around! We are Christians and Jews, atheists and futurists, men and women and everything in between, black people from the South and recent immigrants from Asia. We are all so distinctive. And we believe a million different things. How dare you call us all the denizens of a single cosmology — and a counting-house ‘moneyworld’ at that!”

Almost. But not really. What we are, mostly, of course, is moderns, and what that means is that we navigate a world mapped in money values. A world shaped by ever-more-powerful programs for aggregating and augmenting “wealth” — wealth measured in dollars and cents. The masters of our universe are the financiers who look ceaselessly for ways to make their capital return new and bigger profits. We follow them, and pay tribute, when we can, with our little mutual funds. And we, too, as consumers and life-long market players, try to figure out how to win in the ledger book of existence: to buy the stuff we want for prices we can pay; to get ours at the auction block where we sell our wares, our time, our eyes, our minds. Indeed, we play the market with our whole beings, since we do everything we can to be rational self-maximizers in the continuous competition of the workforce, which demands that we conceive of ourselves as human capital, and “invest” in ourselves, through education and training, to optimize the ROI of our lives.

So what matters to the moneyworld? Money matters. What is “meaning” in the moneyworld? A billion dollars is meaning — everyone gets that. Are there other kinds of meaning? Sure, maybe. Like “happiness”, perhaps? True, we know it is a thing. But the good news is that economists can make you a model for it — denominated in dollars, naturally (they have no other units). What their models cannot capture is squishy at best. It might be real stuff, but it is so hard to quantify. Better pick a major in college that pays real dividends. In cash. You can puzzle about happiness after you make your first million.

Let me be clear about my view here: money is fine. Yes, yes, it is indeed a powerful technology for coordinating human behaviors, and markets can do good things at scale — allocate resources, drive innovation — in ways that are unmatched by any other social system or set of beliefs. I get it.

But the moneyworld is a world organized by price, a world of pure and continuous calculation. It is a world that only a machine could love — and the machines do love it. They run the numbers and keep the accounts. They have the data, and they use it — to monetize us, actually. Indeed, it is increasingly their world, and we only live in it — with many of us feeling more and more alienated and angry and unsure of what comes next.

A turn in the Oceania gallery of the Met is a chance to be reminded of how strange our machinic moneyworld really is. It has engulfed the planet as a ubiquitous system of meaning and order — but it has no soul whatsoever. No imagination. It knows, in the end, nothing about the stuff that makes us what we are as human animals: the dreams, the nightmares, our unique ability to find each other and tell stories powerful enough to make the earth a home and turn perfect strangers into kin — all the mad and magnificent ways we have worked to make sense of the experience of being alive on this planet. What makes us human, ultimately, is our ability to make meaning, not money. And we have done that in millions of ways, across millennia.

In New Guinea alone, a single island, there are some 800 different language communities. In some regions a mere 50 miles separates groups who are farther apart in linguistic and cultural traditions than China and France. How different are these worlds? Very. Look over here, at this “yam mask” from the Abelam people of the Middle Sepik River, over the ridge from the Asmat. It was placed on giant, man-sized tubers in rituals of fertility and initiation. It sits in a case, here, as a small and mysterious fragment from a very different cosmology of meaning and practice. Little of that world survives, of course: the grandsons of the makers of that mask probably work for the moneyworld now, logging in Malaysia.

Will a stack of greenbacks someday sit in a museum case on Mars, as artifacts of our globe-spanning but heedless and apparently self-destructive worldview? Who can say. But I like to imagine what the curators would write on the label.

For now, we have our work cut out for us. It is time to dig in and think hard about the different ways our ancestors have made meaning. Because what it is to be a human being is an urgent question to which every one of us had better have an answer. The rise of super-powerful human-emulator AI systems — which are both the flower of the moneyworld and its killer app — has made the question of our actual humanity the blazing question of our time.

We have been and believed so many things. That diversity, now, is a powerful inspiration as we face the monolithic moneyworld we have made. How can we arm ourselves against dehumanization in all its brutal forms? I don’t know. But I do know that there is no whitepaper that is going to save us. And that our museums, most of them, remain open. Some of the thinking we need is going to happen in their halls. It must.

But why stop there? To create even better conditions for career destruction, make sure that — like Walsh — you have hitherto impressive progressive credentials, having just published a monograph putatively connecting US conservatism to racism and fascism. (Only last week Walsh authored a New York Times op ed to advertise said book, alleging that “a generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain”.)

For luck, combine your rant about the difficulty of getting a job as a “white dude” with showboating about personal accomplishments and popularity, and the claim that you are better qualified than many of those to whom you have lost out in the past. In doing all this, you will have gifted envious fellow academics the means and opportunity to ruin you reputationally, while pretending to be striking a blow in the name of anti-racism. Meanwhile, a gleeful conservative commentariat will goad and mock you for being a self-loathing sap, for whom the subservient pose did not work in any case.

From the outside, it’s impossible to say whether Walsh was right in his since-retracted diagnosis of why he has yet to make the cut. Faced with repeated rejections, it is of course comforting to think there must be a more impersonal explanation than the simple fact you aren’t as impressive as your rivals. Even so, a quick look at the academic jobs market makes it clear Walsh’s inference was understandable, whether or not it is correct.

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How universities killed the academic

By Kathleen Stock

For instance: this week, 84 jobs are advertised under “History” on the international career website jobs.ac.uk, of which the majority are temporary positions. By my reckoning, around 10% — a significant trend, though not overwhelmingly so — have a direct or indirect reference to non-white ethnicity. Vacancies include: a career development fellowship in West African history; a professorship in “Anticolonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Histories and Praxes”; a research fellowship in archaeology aimed at candidates “of Black Identity or Heritage”; a studentship entitled “Mapping Fossil Colonialism in Asia” and another on “Decolonising the Pathways between Soil Science Agricultural Policy”; a career development fellowship in “Global (African) History”; and a “Research Fellow in Reparative Studies of Education”. (In what sounds like a project guaranteed to put kids off academia for life, the latter examines “reparations and reparative justice in school education” and collaborates “with primary school-communities in the city of Bristol to design and conduct in-depth ethnographic and oral-history research on the features and mechanisms of structural inequities”).

Though the managers who wrote these adverts might not admit the fact, it seems safe to assume that in their ideal scenarios, the associated posts would not be filled by white men. Still, there are more David Austin Walshs in humanities subjects than you might think: beavering away on some heinous aspect of the Atlantic slave trade, settler colonialism, Jim Crow or forced migration, hoping it will save them. Undoubtedly, they believe they do valuable work, and some do; but that isn’t to say they would have made the same research choices in a different context. Universities have been in the grip of transitory intellectual fashions for centuries, and today is no different.

Such transactional behaviour doesn’t fit with the popular archetype of the unworldly scholar, going only where his curiosity takes him for nothing more than the thrill of the chase. But the contemporary chronicler of negative European legacies need not be cynical or self-loathing; no more so, anyway, than any other person with ambition, naturally gravitating towards what will serve as a means of getting ahead. On the contrary, looking for a competitive edge in this crowded field makes him a rational actor. Thousands of freshly anointed doctorate-holders are disgorged every year into an international jobs market that’s already heaving, and permanent positions are vanishingly rare. This, I submit, is the more immediately convincing explanation of why Walsh cannot get a job: simply put, the numbers game is overwhelmingly against him.

In 2020-21, there were nearly 105,000 doctoral students enrolled in UK universities, which coincidentally was around the same number of staff employed on academic contracts at the time. One survey reported that 67% of doctoral students desired an academic job at the end of it; in reality though, only a small proportion of them could possibly succeed. Since then, the number of PhD students has reportedly risen, yet undergraduate numbers in the arts and humanities are falling, and many universities are either making redundancies or are on the brink. In other words: this does not look like a good sector in which to invest several more years of your one wild and precious life.

Equally though, it is far from clear that doing a PhD gives you an advantage in non-academic fields either. Having perhaps hung around for a couple of temporary research associate jobs after your doctorate, or nearly killed yourself in short-term teaching positions covering other people’s leave, once you eventually accept your fate and get out of academia you will have to start again as a junior to peers of the same age. You will probably have substantially more debt than them, and some employers will now perceive you as fatally over-specialised.

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It's time to abolish the university

By Terry Eagleton

The only recent study I know of which tries to gauge whether there is a financial benefit to getting a PhD finds a “modest” premium for doctorate-holders over the course of a lifetime, but less so for humanities than for other disciplines. It also notes that financial benefits tend to accrue late in one’s career, due an increased association between PhD-holding and management positions. Arguably, this makes the outlook for arts and humanities doctorates worse not better. Temperamentally, the sort of person attracted to spending four years furrowing his brow in a dusty archive may not be a particularly natural fit with management.

So, why do people still pursue PhDs in subjects like History at all? One plausible answer is that they don’t know how poor their chances are of getting a university post at the end of it. Though managers and research council heads occasionally make vaguely deprecatory noises — after all, most universities run doctoral programmes at a financial loss they can barely afford — the information does not seem to be filtering through to the average applicant. And it’s hardly their fault.

On the contrary, university websites tend to contain enthusiastic descriptions of the benefits of postgraduate studies. At departmental level, many faculty members are extremely keen to entice potential doctoral applicants from their existing pool of undergraduate and Master’s students — more plainly, to intellectually groom them — for the self-interested reason that having a strong record of doctoral supervision is often a condition of successful promotion as a lecturer. Other staff have research specialties that don’t lend themselves to teaching on big undergraduate courses and so also have a vested interest in supervising as many PhDs as possible, in order to maintain an appearance of earning their keep. And then there’s the fact that, for some, having doctoral students around the place is treated as a sign of prestige, and speaks more to their vision of the leisurely discursive joys of academic life than giving repetitive lectures to masses of bored undergraduates.

In short, then, those already working in universities cannot be trusted about the true value of a PhD in relation to the prospects of those they supervise. They have too much skin in the game. Lured in by fantasies — both their own, and those of their supervisors — it is all too easy for doctoral students to start imagining themselves as fully-formed lecturers before they have finished their first chapter; at which point nobody wants to tell them they don’t actually stand a chance in hell. Many are exploited by management for cheap teaching labour while pretending it will increase their career chances, and that doesn’t help dispel the fantasies either. In my experience, trying to warn someone halfway through a PhD that they should conjure up an alternative plan for the future doesn’t go down well — the time to say this was probably before they told all their relatives they had decided they were going to be a lecturer.

For a professional sector so stuffed with moralists obsessed with informed consent, it is perhaps surprising that a relatively grave injustice is done to thousands of new doctoral students in universities every year without anyone really noticing. What isn’t as surprising is that, at the other end of the experience, the victims of the scam — for what else can we call it? — tend to feel angry and disillusioned. A bit like disappointed incels once sold a dream of romance, depressive types with “Dr” emblazoned on their credit cards mope around university cities, heads full of incommunicable knowledge and hearts full of embitterment, unable to fully accept that their imagined story arc didn’t work out even after all those flattering things their supervisors and examiners said. Though resentful would-be intellectuals are not the easiest of characters to feel sorry for, in this case we should probably try.

Boba has a reputation for being a drink that’s all sugar and no substance. Likewise, a boba liberal is an Asian who uncritically subscribes to the Democrat party line that “diversity is our strength!”, while making shallow tributes to Asian-American identity, such as celebrating representation in Hollywood. While it is commonly used by conservatives, “boba liberalism” was actually named by the other sworn enemy of liberals: Leftists. It was coined by a socialist Twitter activist, who wrote that “Boba Liberalism is thinking t-shirts, products, and merchandise are the main way of affirming one’s racial identity”.

The term is also used to describe Asians who are deemed to have been “whitewashed” — to have abandoned their “authentic” Asian identity to assimilate into the middle class. But how do you decide what counts as “authentic”, when the whole concept of Asian-American identity is built on a shaky foundation? African Americans are mostly descended from individuals who crossed the Atlantic centuries ago as slaves, and are therefore disconnected from their ancestors: they had no choice but to create a new culture from scratch, which gives it a coherence. Asian Americans, by contrast, have only existed in significant numbers for the past few decades. They have stronger ties, as well as living relatives, with other hugely varying nations. Bureaucracy may still lump together East and South Asians, but the two groups are two distinct races in everyday life. Ironically, in an era when racial minorities are encouraged to think about themselves as categories on a census form, boba liberalism is pushing a pan-Asian identity that does not actually exist.

The recent New York Times article “What Does It Mean to Be an Asian American Brewer?” is a classic example of how that identity is pushed. The author emphasises how few Asians there are in the industry, and points how those breweries which have succeeded began using Asian motifs, such as Chinese Zodiac symbols, only once they became popular. The only real difference between an Asian and a non-Asian brewery, apparently, is that an Asian brewery engages in self-Orientalism so that the mostly non-Asian customers can get feel like they are getting an “exotic” experience, even though the beer tastes just like any classic American beer.

Over time, politically conservative Asian Americans have also come to enthusiastically adopt the term “boba liberal” — mainly because it gave them a chance to “own the libs”. Like Asian Leftists, conservative Asians view boba liberals as not possessing an authentic Asian-American identity, but for the Right, disparaging boba liberalism is not a way to critique capitalism. It is a way of taking aim at a small but influential group of progressive Asian-American activists who are supposedly selling out other Asians, especially working-class Asians, in order to win brownie points from elite, generally white liberals.

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By Asra Q. Nomani

After all, Boba liberalism is, essentially, an Asian version of white liberalism — or wokeness. The core of this identity is self-flagellation, the sacred mission to “do the work” of atoning for being born white, the original sin. As Tom Holland has suggested, wokeness is a direct by-product of European Christian morality. And modern-day white liberalism has largely abandoned Christianity, but persistent is the desire to make up for the offences of one’s ancestors, and to see that the last shall be first and that the first shall be last.

As the most educated in society have adopted the tenets of this new religion, people who want access to elite spaces feel immense pressure to convert. Asian Americans from middle- to upper-class families are typically from majority-white neighbourhoods, and the urge to join the club is immense. (This demographic has the highest rates of getting into elite colleges.) Since white guilt is in vogue among their white liberal peers, they have created their own version.

Boba liberals cleave to the idea that that “anti-blackness” is endemic in Asian-American communities. In Liquor Store Dreams, for example, the Korean American filmmaker So Yun Um turns her parents’ experience of running a shop in a majority-black neighbourhood into a critique of this supposed anti-black racism. Her parents were working-class immigrants who toiled for decades to give her a better life, but she has risen above them socially, becoming a filmmaker — and is now castigating them to gain acceptance in her new class.

In an interview to promote the film, she tells the story of a Korean American friend who was accosted and robbed on the street by a black person. Her friend felt conflicted because he didn’t want to bring race into how he viewed the incident. The rest of the interview focuses on the myriad ways Korean Americans are said to perpetuate anti-blackness. When discussing attacks on Asians, for instance, she says: “If you’re in a predominantly black and brown neighbourhood, if an accident were happening, who else would be the assailant? It wouldn’t be a white person because a white person doesn’t live there.” Note her use of the word “accident”, rather than, say, “attack”. By doing so she is unintentionally perpetuating the obviously racist idea that a black person can’t help being an “assailant”; it denies black Americans agency. There is no similar call for black Americans to “unlearn anti-Asianness”, because in a boba liberal’s mind, how can they possibly take responsibility for their actions?

While boba liberals may experience anti-Asian racism themselves, they know there is little social capital to be gained from discussing it. The common assumption is that Asians are mostly well-off and do not need liberal saviours, unlike black Americans. The latter are often portrayed in popular culture as living tough lives in “the hood”. But working-class Asians tend to cluster in ethnic enclaves that receive very little media attention. The dominant Asian stereotype is of the “crazy rich Asian”. Boba liberals will intentionally distance themselves from these working-class Asians. Anyone who doesn’t toe the progressive party line on every issue is actually an ally of white supremacists.

Unsurprisingly, then, boba liberals often support affirmative action over merit-based admissions policies. In other words, they support a process based not on a clear set of consistently applied rules, but on more nebulous, unspoken criteria set by elite ideology. This benefits them, because they understand the “right” things to do and say to gain access to institutions such as Harvard. Working-class Asian Americans have little-to-no social capital and have the “wrong ideas”, however, and thus prefer merit-based admissions policies that don’t require intricate knowledge of elite codes.

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But being against affirmative action is considered “wrong” by affluent progressives; for them, the policy is an accessory they can tout to signal that they believe in the value of having a superficially multiracial ruling class. And just as affluent white liberals feel ashamed about white MAGA voters or Brexiteers, boba liberals are embarrassed by working-class Asians and their “incorrect” views.

As Rob Henderson has pointed out, Asian Americans are adopting “luxury beliefs, which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while often inflicting costs on the lower classes” — which he sees as “an indicator of assimilation” into upper-middle class America. A similar phenomenon is happening among Latinos: the college-educated now use the term “Latinx” as a class signifier, a term that is deeply unpopular with the vast majority of Latinos. It seems, then, that racial solidarity is not as powerful as class solidarity. America’s liberal elite have all converged on one value system that sets them apart, while pretending to be “diverse” through shallow imitations of identity.

Since the Sixties, the answer on campuses from Harvard down has been race-based affirmative action — a policy dedicated to increasing racial diversity on campuses. Until today, that is, when the Supreme Court rejected the practice as unconstitutional.

In the coming days, you will no doubt be treated to a cacophony of views either celebrating the decision as a victory for meritocracy or abhorring it as a racist verdict that exposes the white supremacy inherent in our institutions. What you won’t hear, however, is much discussion about whether affirmative action has realised its intended outcome of raising black Americans, the descendants of slaves and victims of segregation, out of poverty. It is all too easy for a university to boast about having a certain number of black kids on campus. It is much harder to reflect on whether the policy that put them there has succeeded more generally.

While the birth of affirmative action can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, its role in college admissions was only secured by a Supreme Court ruling in 1978. Since then, all affirmative-action policies have articulated the same goal: to make the second-class socio-economic status of black Americans a thing of the past.

In part, this was to be celebrated. In the US, access to college is seen as a prerequisite for success; indeed, those with bachelor’s degrees tend to earn significantly more than those with only a high school diploma: 75% more, according to one recent study. In other words, despite recent cynicism, affirmative action comes from a genuine desire to improve the lives of black Americans.

But have these attempts worked? Although the formal and objective legal and social barriers to black prosperity have been eliminated, and despite the fact that all sorts of other government welfare and criminal justice policies have been adopted since the Sixties, disparities between white and black Americans remain entrenched in wealth, education, housing and crime. One recent study by the Federal Reserves notes, for instance, that black households earn on average about half as much as white households. In fact, black Americans do less well than any other minority groups in America, including other black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

As for those black Americans who do get into college, only 42% graduate within six years — well below the national average  of 63%. Forgive me for spelling this out, but it bears emphasising: if you are a black college student in America, you are more likely to drop out than graduate.

From a humanitarian point of view, then, one of the key problems with the debate around affirmative action is that it focuses on admissions, and not on the trajectories of students after they are admitted. For a university to enrol a student is, in some ways, easy — in the sense that all it consists of is sending out a formal letter. By contrast, putting the admitted student on the path to graduation and a successful future is more challenging. All of which raises an uncomfortable question: just how fair is it to admit students without considering their ultimate chance of degree completion and the debt load they will be saddled with regardless of whether they graduate? Or, to frame it more constructively: if affirmative action is not the answer to the plight of black America, what is?

To answer this, it pays to compare successful black Americans with those who lag behind. In May 2022, I attended a conference of distinguished black thinkers, including Clarence Thomas, Glenn Loury and Ian Rowe. During the gathering, I identified three main groups of black Americans. The first consists of those who are quietly successful and rarely make the news. Even during segregation, they somehow prospered, and with the abolition of formal racism in America, they thrived.

The second faction is embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. These people loudly argue that recent racial progress is irrelevant and seek to exploit the history of American racism to further their own radical agenda. They mostly come from affluent families, which is perhaps why they prefer to focus on skin colour rather than economic class as an explanation for why black America remains disadvantaged. This is the group which benefits most from affirmative action policies.

The third grouping is made up of a vast number of poor black Americans. They tend to be wards of the state, in prison, involved in or affected by crime, unemployed or employed in low-paying jobs that are threatened by mass immigration and growing automation. The second group claims to speak for this group’s interests, but in fact exploits their genuine grievances for their own political ends, encouraging poor black Americans to think of themselves as forever doomed to be victims. This inspires a mindset of permanent resentment and does nothing at all to actually inspire them, let alone improve their economic circumstances in an enduring manner.

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The other obvious difference is that those in group one tend to come from stable, monogamous families. They largely complete their education before marrying and having children. They cultivate a strong work ethic and are members of strong communities.

The problem is that poor black Americans (group three) live in an environment in which these values are difficult to nourish. They often face an intergenerational cycle of poverty involving fractured families, dysfunctional school systems and financial strain. Young men are forced to look to all the wrong role models to survive, embracing norms that are not compatible with durable socio-economic stability.

When one looks at other demographics, however, one finds that this pattern is not solely racial. The factors outlined above can lock any group of people into poverty, forcing them to live in neighbourhoods where violence is common and education is poor. In such cases, the cycle continues. Think, for example, of the poor white Americans discussed in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, who have ended up in distinct but not entirely dissimilar circumstances.

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Besides strong families that nurture habits associated with stability and success in life — literacy, inquisitiveness, a hard work ethic — access to good schools at an early age is essential for remedying the economic disparities. And this is where affirmative action stepped in, no doubt because other factors — such as stable families — were beyond the power of legislators to address.

Seen in this light, affirmative action on its own could never solve the problems of black Americans born into terrible environments, because its operation came too late. It worked in the latter half of the 20th century for those black Americans who came from environments that encouraged high educational attainment, because the only obstacle facing them was formal discrimination based on skin colour. But it could not work for those who came from less auspicious backgrounds. If you were poor, it was never going to be enough.

So, what comes next? Of course, nobody is to blame for the environment into which they are born. But, equally, we have to recognise that there are good and bad environments — and whichever one you are born into does affect your life outcome. Accepting this is the first step to solving the disparities faced not just by black Americans but also by other disadvantaged groups in the US. This was affirmative action’s fundamental flaw: the plight of poor black Americans has little to do with race. It was a policy inspired by good intentions, born into a world that no longer exists.

This week, Blum spoke to me about his fight for legal justice, his enduring faith in colour-blindness, and the importance of family values and “tiger moms” in educational success. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Freddie Sayers: When it comes to your lawsuits against racial affirmative action in education, is there one that is likely to dominate at the US Supreme Court in the coming months?  

Edward Blum: There are two cases pending. “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard”, and a similar case, “Students for Fair Admissions v. the University of North Carolina”. Students for Fair Admissions is a membership organisation that I founded in 2014. We sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their admissions policies violate the current laws regarding race and ethnicity in college admissions. But more importantly, we argued before the court that allowing race and ethnicity to be a factor at all in college admissions violates the Supreme Court jurisprudence, going back years and year, as well as the US Constitution.

FS: Can you explain how affirmative action is affecting admissions to American universities?

EB: The United States law today, as interpreted about 20 years ago by the Supreme Court, allows colleges and universities to put a thumb on the scale — that is, to rig an outcome — based upon a student’s race or ethnicity. In the case of Harvard and other elite universities, that thumb on the scale is now diminishing the opportunity of Asian Americans to be admitted, while boosting that of African Americans, Hispanics and whites. This is not only going on at Harvard, but at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and dozens of other competitive colleges.

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FS: So what you’re saying is that this form of affirmative action actually helps white people? 

EB: It does.

FS: How does that work?

EB: Let me give you an example that we presented in court. Take a typical Asian-American, male applicant to Harvard and assume his grades and test scores give him a 25% likelihood of being admitted. Now change the race of that applicant to white and the likelihood that that white student will be admitted goes up to 36%. If you change their race to Hispanic, the likelihood jumps to 75%. And if you change their race to African American, that student now has a 95% chance of being admitted to Harvard. This is not a light thumb on the scales. This is a dispositive policy that prohibits better-qualified Asian Americans from being admitted.

FS: Is it a sense of unfairness towards the Asian American community that drives you? Or is it a defence of meritocracy from first principles?

EB: There isn’t a simple answer. I think what drives me, and what drives this movement, is the belief that America was born with a terrible scar on its history. And that is the history of slavery that then evolved into a history of Jim Crow racism against African Americans. What came out of that, what was bitterly fought for on the battlefields and in the courthouses of America, is the belief that your race and ethnicity should not be used to help or to harm you in any of your life’s endeavours: whether you’re applying for a job, or to college or medical school. So that’s what drives me and that’s what drives, frankly, the vast majority of Americans, who — when polled about the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions, or employment, or in other areas — believe that race shouldn’t be a part of these decisions.

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FS: This reminds me of the famous Martin Luther King quote about being judged on the content of your character, not by the colour of your skin. And yet, the phrase “colourblind” has become controversial in recent years. Do you use it?

EB: I do, just as the founders of the modern Civil Rights Movement did. There are, I think, a small minority of Americans who, in good faith, see colour-blindness as a reversion to white supremacy. However, in poll after poll, going back 30 years, Americans celebrate the idea of colour-blindness. They don’t want their race to be used as an element in whether they’re hired or fired, or whether the police pull them over, or whether they’re selected for jury duty. Americans embrace colour-blindness — and it’s not just white Americans, it’s a vast majority of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians.

FS: What would the future look like if the Supreme Court revokes affirmative action? The most recent Harvard diversity statistics say that African-American students make up 15.2% of the student population, Asian-American 27.9%, Hispanic or Latino 12.6%, Native American 2.9%, and Native Hawaiian 0.8%. Judging by these figures, I guess it means that roughly half would be white. How would that change if you win the ruling?

EB: We did a study for the courts back in 2018, and the premise was, if Harvard only uses grade point averages and standardised test scores as a metric for admissions, it’s likely that Asian Americans will make up about 50% of the incoming freshman class. The number of Hispanics will go up slightly, while the number of Whites and African Americans will go down slightly.

FS: How far down would they go?

EB: African Americans would drop to about 10% of the incoming freshman class, down from 15% now. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think whites came in at around 30%, with Hispanics about 10% — maybe a little bit more.

I believe Harvard will be compelled to change the entire framework of its admissions policy. Right now, there is a significant boost given to students whose parents also attended Harvard — the legacy status. That may change dramatically. The “tips” [leg up] given to certain athletes or those who play water polo or fencing, that may be changed. And more importantly, Harvard may start to lower the bar a little for students who have come from very modest, or even disadvantaged backgrounds, who are the first in their family to attend college, who are raised by a single parent, whose family income falls below a certain level.

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FS: Would you approve of that?

EB: We absolutely would. We’ve advocated for this at the Supreme Court. It is an important element of our argument.

FS: So you’re not entirely opposed to affirmative action? You’re only against it on racial grounds. If it gives preference to students based on social economic group or education, you’re all for it?

EB: That’s perfectly said. This organisation is against race-based affirmative action. However, we encourage Harvard and other universities to use socio-economic affirmative action. They should be trying to attract a truly diverse group of individuals, not just in terms of skin colour, but in terms of their backgrounds.

FS: My gut feeling would be that a lot of conservatives would make a libertarian objection — that these are private institutions, and that they should not be told by the state who they can and can’t admit. What do you say to those people?

EB: We have a solution to those objections, and that is that Harvard can forego receiving federal funds. There are a handful of colleges and universities in the United States that have done exactly that; Hillsdale College is probably the best known. If Harvard chooses to not accept federal funds, then they can shape the class in any way they would like.

FS: How would you respond to the Left-wing critique that, unless you force institutions to accept a certain quota of minority people, they will simply go back to prioritising their preferred groups?

EB: I think they’re wrong for two reasons. For one thing, it assumes that the academic gaps between African Americans, Hispanics, whites, and Asians are intractable; that there is no way, based upon the history of the United States, that they will ever narrow. That’s just not correct. It assumes that there is somehow a system in place that prevents this. Asian Americans are outperforming whites academically, despite having fewer resources, less family wealth, and lower income levels.

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FS: The cliché goes that Asian Americans have “tiger moms” who make them do their homework and take academics seriously — and that’s why they are so high-achieving. Is that a fair observation? 

EB: Well, coming from a Jewish background myself, I had a Jewish tiger mom who didn’t let me hang out at the basketball court with my buddies after school or drive around and see girls. We had to study and we had to achieve. The most important educational institution in the United States, and I think, perhaps in the UK as well, is the family. Learning begins at the cradle, and parents within the Asian community realise that. That’s something which can be replicated among whites, Hispanics and African Americans as well.

FS: So rather than implementing defeatist university quotas, society should be getting to the root of the issue by helping and encouraging parents to improve early life education? 

EB: That’s an incredibly important part of the argument, but there is something else that is deeply troubling about race-based affirmative action. That is, in universities that lower the bar for African Americans and Hispanics, we often see students either dropping out because their academic backgrounds are not sufficient to compete, or switching to less competitive courses. This means that students who hope to become doctors, engineers or computer scientists end up graduating with degrees in the humanities or social sciences, which wouldn’t have happened had they gone to a college where their qualifications were better matched. That’s another important element that I think will change.

FS: There’s a practical argument there, that students would reach a better place later in life if they weren’t artificially pushed into places that maybe didn’t suit them.

EB: That’s exactly right, and there’s data and studies to endorse that. Plus, there’s one other element here. We’ve heard it, and we can read it, and we’ve seen it a million times: minority kids on competitive campuses are told that the only reason that they are there is because they are a certain race, not because they were academically qualified. So those kids who truly were academically qualified feel like: “Because the bar is lowered for all African Americans, even though I scored as well as any Asian on this campus, people think I’m here because I’m black.” That’s a terrible burden, too.

FS: Now, I’m not going to try and do a “gotcha”, Mr. Blum, but I do feel like the last couple of arguments would equally apply to affirmative action for people who come from a more deprived background or have had fewer education opportunities — they too would arrive at the college without the necessary preparation and may have to drop out. How is that any different?

EB: That is very true. You may notice that I said “Lower the bar a little bit”. You cannot lower the bar dramatically for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, just as you cannot lower the bar for kids from ethnic or racial backgrounds. Kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t walk around campus with signs saying “Family below poverty level”, or “I’m the first in my family to go to college”. You won’t know that just looking at kids from those backgrounds. They may have disclosed it to their friends and others, but you won’t know it.

FS: So there’s less stigma, but is it not similarly defeatist? It puts the onus on these institutions, while, actually, as a society, we need to do better in terms of helping families to look after — and not give up on — their kids. 

EB: Trillions of dollars in this country have been spent trying to narrow the gaps in educational attainment between African Americans and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other. And it has been only modestly successful. We can spend more money, but I think the bulk of the solution is within the family.

And could resources be put there? Sure, but it’s really up to moms and dads to do this. I have been to the homes of Asian students — one-bedroom, very modest apartments in Queens, New York, where mom is a maid at a Midtown hotel and dad is a doorman at an apartment building on the Upper East Side. They have the bedroom, their two children sleep in the living room. Very modest backgrounds. How is it that these kids have done so well in school? Because mom and dad were there and encouraged them. They put their own limited resources into their education. So that’s what needs to be done more than just about anything else.

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FS: So there needs to be some uncomfortable home truths spoken to some of these other communities that are underperforming, saying: “Look, we need you to focus on family life and pay proper attention to education.” Do these communities need to take responsibility for the outcomes?

EB: That’s right.

FS: If your case is successful, do you think it will have ramifications beyond the sphere of higher education?

EB: My great hope is that the opinion that comes out of these two Supreme Court cases provides the US with a legal doctrine that can be applied with regards to employment, to fellowships and scholarships, to voting and contracting issues, and that this doctrine will be the beginning of the restoration of the great colourblind covenant that has held together this country through very difficult periods of history. That’s my hope: that the justices give us something that not only applies to higher education, but also to other, very important areas of American life.

It’s significant, then, that in the past decade or so dozens of colleges have withdrawn their SAT requirement. Institutions such as Harvard and the entire University of California system, and dozens of others, have either gone test-optional, meaning students can submit their scores but are not required to, or rejected the test entirely. Sometimes, the alternative is to further emphasise GPA, or grade point average — that is, the average grades students earn in high school, often weighted according to the perceived difficulty of the course. In other tellings, the alternative is to embrace so-called “holistic admissions”, which means more emphasis on the essay that pupils submit, extracurriculars, and the “feel” of an application. Either way, this rejection of the test is couched in the language of social justice and equality, with anti-SAT crusaders insisting that the test is inegalitarian, racist, and obsolete.

With race-based affirmative action likely to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court early next year, the question of diversity on campus is as live and laden with tension as ever. Diversity, in this context, means racial diversity specifically. It might seem odd to recommend an obscure academic book from 2018 as an essential read to understand this tension, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Measuring Success: Testing, Grades, and the Future of College Admissions is a collection of studies from the fields of educational measurement and psychometrics. It powerfully confirms the value of the SAT and similar entrance exams.

It’s essential to understand what kind of student was particularly well-served by the SAT: the kind who is bright and talented but who had failed to live up to their potential in class. These students tended to be the brilliant dreamers; they were the ones in possession of uncommon cognitive skills, but who performed poorly in knowledge-based exams because of bad time management, resistance to the indignities of organised education, or an inability to prioritise school over their own interests. For decades, excellent SAT scores got students into colleges that they wouldn’t ordinarily get into, creating opportunities to find diamonds in the rough who had perhaps never found their footing in school.

The students who the SAT disadvantaged, in contrast, were the grinders — those who were not particularly talented or gifted but who were able to get good grades through ingratiating themselves to teachers, studying maniacally, and always getting whatever points were available for effort. There’s no doubt that society needs both types of student, but the elimination of the SAT benefits only one sort.

There are many fundamental misconceptions that plague discussion of the SATs, and unfortunately, my long experience discussing the test tells me that most people’s ignorance is of the motivated kind. I got my PhD in English, but my focus was on the assessment of student learning and my dissertation was on tests of college learning. And what I learned during that process, and have had reinforced since, is that many people want to maintain myths about such tests out of a sense of resentment and naïve political concerns. This book helpfully dispatches with many common, but bad, arguments.

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Consider the claim that the SAT should be abolished because it is not in fact a strong predictor of college performance. Those who make it often throw around correlations between the SAT and freshman year grades that appear to be low. But this is a quirk of how that data is collected. Such analyses can necessarily only consider students who got a high enough SAT score to get into a given college; that is, students who don’t get into college can’t have college grades, and so that whole sector of data is missing from analysis. This is a classic case of range restriction. If we correct for this problem, the SAT’s correlation with freshman grades is robust and consistent. The authors of Measuring Success demonstrate this, before going on to show empirically that SATs predict not just first-year college but a number of other important indicators of life success.

They note, too, that we have known about this range restriction issue for decades, and yet critics of the SAT continue to make this elementary mistake. It speaks to the committed ignorance many people have on this topic. There’s such deep resentment towards high-stakes tests, which cause stress for test-takers before starkly ranking them, that people are willing to look beyond little things like intellectual consistency or responsible evaluation of research.

The GPA is already broadly considered the single-most important criterion for applicants. The crowd that would prefer to give it even more consideration in admissions are at least still sticking with a quantitative indicator; the question is why we would prefer less quantitative data (just GPA) rather than more (GPA plus SAT).

In a nice show of professional respect, Measuring Success reprints a 2009 study that is often invoked by SAT critics. That research found that GPA was a strong predictor of college success, which some take to mean that we can safely discard the SAT, because it adds nothing to our understanding of a student’s potential. But Measuring Success goes on to examine a replication of this study, with newer data, which finds that the predictive accuracy of GPA has fallen, probably due to grade inflation, a problem which does not afflict a test like the SAT, which is normed every year. The SAT’s predictive quality, in contrast, went up.

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If nothing else, using the SAT ensures that more information, and more kinds of information, are used in selecting students. But this kind of diversity — diversity of thinking and learning and academic style — is not the kind of diversity that competitive colleges are pursuing. Elite American colleges are already more racially diverse than the country writ large, but the perpetual cry is for more people of colour on campus. This is the source of the most persistent criticisms of the SAT. The broad claim about the SAT is that, since there are race and class disparities in SAT scores — white and Asian pupils score better than Hispanic and black, and rich better than poor — then the test must be discriminatory and should be abolished.

This is a bit like blaming seismographs for earthquakes. The SAT does not create inequality; the SAT reveals inequality. Contemporary progressives believe that black people and poorer people face many hurdles in life, thanks to entrenched inequality. I agree entirely. But if we’ve acknowledged that, how can we blame the SAT when its results are skewed against the poor and racial minorities? All of that inequality has consequences, and one of those consequences is poorer test scores. All educational data is race-and-class stratified, including the gold-standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, various state-specific exams, ancillary data like attendance and discipline, and crucially, GPA. That’s right: the very metric that many critics of the SAT would have us replace the test with shows the same race and class dynamics!

Perhaps this is why test-optional efforts to diversify campuses have often fallen flat. Crucially, Measuring Success presents three studies that consider the question of whether going test-optional results in a more diverse campus — and all three find no evidence to support that claim. For example, the study “The Effect of Going Test-Optional on Diversity and Admissions” finds that going test optional “has no statistically significant effect… on the proportion of underrepresented students of colour enrolling in the institution”. If removing the SAT does not in fact improve minority representation, then what are we doing here, exactly?

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Of course, admissions officers have plenty of freedom to decide who they’ll accept, particularly at private institutions. As long as schools aren’t engaged in federally-prohibited race or gender discrimination, the average college can select pretty much whoever they want. The schools dropping the SAT make a big show about diversity and equality, never bothering to note that they and not the test determine who gets the brass ring. Advocates for dropping the SAT ask us to put even more faith in those units of our highly-bureaucratic and self-dealing institutions of higher education. And this, finally, is the most irrational belief of all: the notion that, if we only give the admissions departments of exclusive colleges more power, they will do what’s right and usher in a new age of equity and diversity in higher education.

This amounts to a childish faith in institutions that we have no reason to trust. Colleges and universities design their admissions departments, like any other department, with self-interest in mind. To demonstrate this, simply look at affirmative action at elite universities. These institutions keep their data very close to the vest, but it’s widely believed that schools such as Harvard use their affirmative action seats primarily as money-makers. They are alleged to do so by seeking out rich children of recent immigrants, whose parents (they expect) will be able and willing to donate — which would mean the average Ivy League affirmative action slot isn’t filled with a poor American-born descendant of African slaves, but rather with the upwardly-mobile progeny of a Nigerian surgeon.

This is the reality of diversity at elite colleges. Yet critics of the SAT have dogged faith that the SAT is all that stands in the way of more equitable and diverse admissions. The notion is a mirage. If we’re going to fight discrimination and inequality, we’ll need tools to understand the size of the problem — tools like the SAT. Using them, we can embrace not just racial diversity, but diversity in terms of the strengths we recognise in applicants.

I have come to realise that party affiliation is far less important to me than fealty to the values that made it possible for me, a Muslim immigrant from India, to prosper in America. In the summer of 1969, I arrived at JFK International Airport as a four-year-old with no English, destined for a new home in New Jersey and then Morgantown, West Virginia. My parents had made a keen study of US history. They knew it was a nation that had its flaws, but they were encouraged by some pivotal developments, particularly the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which banned racial segregation in public schools and declared unequivocally that race cannot play a role in school admissions. This, they thought, was a fair place to raise their kids.

When I came to learn my adopted nation’s history myself, at Martin Luther King Elementary School, I understood that the painful legacy of slavery was part of it. But I also knew that good and thoughtful people in the present had made honest attempts to address these issues — by passing laws banning racial discrimination, for instance. I hardly thought the US perfect but, as a native of India, I understood that societies that dwell forever on historical grievances tend not to be happy, free or prosperous places. America was fundamentally — and wonderfully — different.

But, in recent years, something very disturbing has happened. That is why, on the night of the midterm elections, I drove west after sundown on Route 66 with my friend Harry Jackson, the first black PTSA president at my son’s alma mater. We were driving to a party of kindred spirits, most of whom didn’t look anything like us.

Why? Because the Democratic Party, which once valued fairness and justice, has, alas, been torching the American Dream. Democratic politicians, school boards, governors and even US Supreme Court justices are pushing “equity” over equality, “anti-racist” bigotry over colour-blindness, and mediocrity over merit. Literacy and maths scores are plummeting nationwide, while black and Hispanic kids are falling further and further behind — and yet progressive Democrats are far more interested in bringing crackpot racialist theories into our classrooms. In other words: they choose indoctrination over education.

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As a teenager and young American, I trended liberal. In the Eighties, I opposed former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s military escapades into Central America, his demand that young men register for the draft and his efforts to ban abortion. Decades later, I moved to Virginia as a single mother with a six-year-old son. Though the state’s history was steeped in racism, Virginia had just voted for a black man to be president. I thought it had finally become progressive enough for a woman of colour like me to raise a child freely.

But among the loudest voices ahead of last week’s midterm elections were those of aggrieved parents, who are waking up to the fact that Democrats aren’t defending a fundamental American value: that children should not be judged on the colour of their skin. Affirmative action wasn’t explicitly on the ballot, but the question of whether we are merit-based and colour-blind was the subtext of multiple campaigns.

In Union City, in the San Francisco Bay, Jeff Wang, who immigrated to the US from China in 1984 as a student, won with the campaign mission that his “American Dream” is to help others “achieve their ‘dream’”. In southern California, Republican Michelle Steel, an immigrant from South Korea, faced a tough race in the 45^th Congressional District against her Democratic opponent (who is Taiwanese American). Earlier this year, Steel signed an amicus brief with 81 congressional colleagues against the use of race in college admissions. “Shutting the door to applicants based on race is wrong,” she later wrote. There was not a single Democrat among the signatories. With votes still being counted, Steel is the frontrunner in her race.

I was 13 when the US Supreme Court Justice ruled, in a landmark 1978 case (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke), that universities could take race into account in admissions if there was a “compelling interest” — like needing to remedy past discrimination — but otherwise it banned racial quotas. In theory it makes sense to correct still-raw injustices with so-called affirmative action. But on the ground, we can’t realise “diversity” just by filling race-based quotas. My father ticked so many “diversity” boxes, but as a teen I saw him devastated by a decision: he had found a home at West Virginia University, happily teaching clinical nutrition, but (white) administrators in the late Seventies denied him tenure. I learned what it meant to fight the machine: my father appealed, represented himself and won tenure, not through quotas, but grit.

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The watch party was full of people with equally impressive trajectories. The host was Republican congressional candidate Hung Cao, who arrived in the US as a refugee from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. His family settled in low-income housing in Reston, Virginia; in 1985 Cao entered the first class of a new selective school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. It had been established to make the US competitive against the Soviet Union in the new field of “STEM”. Back then, local Fairfax County was mostly white, and so was the school, but with increases in the number of Asian technology workers, more of their children started acing the school’s merit-based admissions tests.

Meritocracy, is seemed, was winning. Over the next years, nine states banned public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity at all in admissions to public institutions, kicking off with Proposition 209 in California in 1996. But in the summer of 2003, with my son just a newborn, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Grutter v. Bollinger that universities may use “narrowly-tailored”, “race-conscious” admissions as a “plus” in their efforts to achieve “diversity” on campus — as long as diversity isn’t defined “solely” by race and ethnicity. Former justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion with a sentence that would haunt the court years later. She wrote: “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

The goal of diversity is noble in spirit. But the philosophy of “critical race theory” that dominates so many admissions departments today is toxic and illiberal. The focus is on increasing admissions of black and Hispanic students, meaning that hard-working Asian American students become sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, caught in the crosshairs of preferential treatment for other minorities, as part of a war on merit. Indeed, one of America’s best-known “anti-racists”, Ibram X. Kendi, writes: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

In an attempt to stop racism in the name of “diversity”, more states banned race as a factor in hiring or admissions, including Michigan in 2006 and Oklahoma in 2012. In 2013, the US Supreme Court ruled in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that race can be considered in admissions only under “strict scrutiny”. Late the following year, in 2014, a new organisation, Students for Fair Admissions, filed lawsuits on behalf of Asian American students in federal court against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — for, among other things, violations of Title VI of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which prohibits any schools that receive federal funding from discriminating against people based on race and other identity markers. The Supreme Court’s ruling is expected to land next spring.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

But then came the “racial reckoning” of 2020. In the spring of that year, Harry Jackson’s son was one of six black students admitted to Hung Cao’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. By then, my son was a sophomore at the school, admitted through its race-blind, merit-based admissions process. Little did we know that the school was about to be targeted by “equity warriors”, spurred on by the killing of George Floyd. Our school’s population was 70% Asian — but we were the wrong kind of brown for activists.

That autumn, as my son became a junior and Jackson’s son became a freshman, the local 12-0 Democratic school board became obsessed with rigging the admissions process so that the low number of black and Hispanic students would increase dramatically. In December 2020, in a devastating decision for kids who had been working hard for months to hone their maths skills, the board replaced the school’s merit-based admissions test with a new racially-engineered system that assigned “bonus points” to factors that were seemed like a proxy for race. One of the board members, Abrar Omeish, actually acknowledged in a text message to another member that the new process had an “anti-Asian feel…hate to say it lol”.

In the spring of 2021, a group of our families sued the school board for violating the 14th Amendment, in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. While Democrats condemned us, the Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Republican Glenn Youngkin, understood us. He sent us a video, supporting our efforts to maintain merit-based admissions. At almost 11pm, in his final rally of the election last year, off the backroads of Loudoun County, Virginia, Youngkin declared: “We will not be a Commonwealth of dream stealers. We will be a Commonwealth of dream enablers and builders.” The crowd, including myself, cheered.

And our vision of the American Dream triumphed. In March 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions’ system was “patently unconstitutional”, because it discriminated against Asian American students. In the parlance of “anti-racists”, school officials had put in place systemic racism. The next month, Cao stood with other Asian American families — including my father, then 87, and me — at the steps of the US Supreme Court to argue against racism towards students of Asian descent in admissions to his alma mater. Soon after, Cao, a political newcomer, beat out a tough field of (all white) Republicans to run against Jennifer Wexton, the (white) Democratic incumbent for the 10th Congressional District of Virginia. And it wasn’t long ago that I was back on those steps. On Halloween, I walked into the US Supreme Court, as lawyers from both sides made their arguments in the case against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill.

It was hard to watch the so-called liberal justices turn a blind eye to the blatant anti-Asian racism that has become a hallmark of admissions to schools. But I felt great hope as the majority conservative justices expressed outrage over the “race conscious” biases in admissions. My prediction — and that of legal experts — is that the Court will bar Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill from using race in admissions, ending “race-conscious” systems that discriminate against Asian American students. Schools will likely get sneaky about how they use race, but, in a short video filmed outside the Court, I declared that the day was a “win for America” and all children.

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Antiracism is too middle-class

By Remi Adekoya

That video, once posted, triggered an assault like I had never witnessed before. Pamela Denise Long, a contributor to Newsweek and the creator of “trauma-informed” “humane antiracism” training, shared an image of me from the video and admonished me for “coming to somebody else’s country” and using “their laws” to win rights. I was disparaged as a “tool of white supremacy”, promoting a “wannabe white supremacist ideology”.

My views fall well within the mainstream of the vast majority of ordinary Americans: a new Pew poll of American adults found 74% think race or ethnicity “shouldn’t be considered” in admissions. Moreover, they are supported by countless black leaders. On the eve of Halloween, as Cao waged his battle for political office, Harry Jackson joined a rally of about 500 Asian Americans supporting the lawsuits against Harvard and the UNC Chapel Hill. “I am an ally!” he said. Next to him, an Asian American boy carried a sign: “I have an American Dream too.”

Any yet, my views get me pilloried. Self-described anti-racists bombard me with the view that I am “white adjacent”, “honorary white”, “white passing”, and part of the “dominant culture”. These attacks are reminiscent of the words of white extremists. And yet they come from a movement called “Foundational Black Americans” — which espouses the “Great Replacement” theory of white supremacists, accusing immigrants, including black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, of stealing resources. In one radio show, founder Tariq Nasheed accuses black immigrants of being “tethers” to America with “anchor babies”, “smelling like booty juice and flies”, “smelling like cheetah pee” and taking jobs and resources owed to black people born in the US. Nasheed says Foundational Black Americans is not a hate group, but rather a “lineage”.

My suspicion that the ire directed at me was a comment on my immigrant status was confirmed on the drive to the watch party. Speeding along the tarmac of Route 66, I got a message: “Go back to India.”

By the time I got there, I’d been accused of coming from an “upper caste family” (though I am Muslim, not Hindu); of being a “white Aryan Indian”, allegedly descending from the Aryan tribe that captured Hitler’s imagination; and of having “musty underarms”. “You Asians are the pets of white supremacy, flat face,” wrote one Twitter user.

It is worth saying again: among all this, it is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who are standing up for us. At the party, I was surrounded by people, like me, who feel they have been mugged by the political party that once shared our values and goals — but now gives us no choice but to reach out to the other side. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin understand our concerns. Joe Biden and the progressive ideologues in his party wish we would go away — and belittle us when we refuse. And refuse we do.

At 10pm, the results were in. In a near-final tally, Wexton won 52.83% of the votes while Cao won 46.98%, narrowing the win to six percentage points, compared to Wexton’s 13 percentage point win in her last election in 2020.

“It hurts,” Cao acknowledged to the crowd, but he also stressed that he would never want “race-conscious” allowances to push him, as a minority, to victory. That is the way it should be, whether in schools or society at large. And he will continue fighting for that version of the American Dream. Like me, he declines to live in a society in which people who ought to know better judge, shame and browbeat us because we embrace honesty, hard work and education. We are not the racists here. We are the American Dream.

Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 

I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.

You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.

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The Godfather of Critical Race Theory

By Tomiwa Owolade

This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 

What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: how many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.

And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.

You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 

My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.

How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 

I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.

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What liberals get wrong about race

By Eric Kaufmann

One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.

Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 

The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.

Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.

Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 

So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?

There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.

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But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.

There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.

What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 

The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.

If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.

In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this?

I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.

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Kamala Harris was set up to fail

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.

And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.

It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?

Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.

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So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.

How do we make it better? 

I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

But while Gorsuch and his colleagues applied protections against discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin”, he also made clear that the legislation in question was designed to protect “individuals not groups”. According to the ruling, a scheme that “promotes equality at the group level” would fall foul of the law if it involved discrimination at the individual level.

And so, even as Bostock was heralded as a major moment for LGBT rights, Gorsuch’s opinion set off alarm bells in progressive circles. In particular, many wondered whether his understanding of discrimination spelt trouble for the system of race-based college admissions that has been in place since the civil rights era. Did the last great liberal judicial victory contain clues about the next great liberal defeat? Is “affirmative action” doomed?

These questions may soon be answered. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a case brought by a group of Asian-Americans who claim they were illegally discriminated against as part of the university’s pursuit of a diverse student body. Lower courts have found in favour of Harvard, but many suspect the conservative majority on the Supreme Court may see things differently.

The past pronouncements of Chief Justice John Roberts, without whom a defence of affirmative action has little chance of survival, suggest sympathy with the students’ arguments. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” was his blunt summation in a 2006 case concerning high school integration efforts.

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Silicon Valley's fake diversity problem

By Antonio García Martínez

The lawsuit against Harvard doesn’t just accuse the university of discriminating against Asian-Americans but doing so systematically by marking them down on personality scores that rate traits such likability, “positive personality”, courage and kindness. Analysis of admissions data by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the case, found that an otherwise identical Asian-American male with a 25% chance of admission would have a 32% chance of admission if he were white, a 77% chance if he were Latino and a 95% chance if he were black.

Suspiciously, the very smartest Asian American students tended to score higher for their personalities. The plaintiffs argue that this amounts to a soft quota system and compare its enforcement to the way in which Harvard used “character and fitness” criteria to, with a nod and a wink, cap the number of Jewish students on campus in the 1920s and 30s.

For now, the court has bought itself time by asking the Biden administration for its view of the case. Nonetheless, the stage is set for an almighty battle over one of the most contentious policies to emerge from the civil rights era.

Indeed, whenever the Supreme Court has dealt with affirmative action, its judgments tend to be reflected in the racial politics of the time. In the 1960s, affirmative action was presented as part of a package of emergency measures necessary in the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow and legal segregation. By 1978, the court moved away from explicit desegregation. In Bakke, it found that racial quotas were unconstitutional but that the pursuit of “diversity” for its educational benefits was legal, and that race might be considered a “plus factor” in the admissions process. (It is this vague goal of diversity that explains the scoring system under fire in the Harvard case.)

But this 20th-century liberal fudge is getting harder to sustain. The backdrop to any affirmative action case being heard by the Supreme Court in the near future will be the increasingly strident anti-racist creed preached on college campuses, supported by the Democratic Party and subscribed to by the media and business elite.

Ironically, it is the assertiveness of today’s racial politics that may make the defence of affirmative action more difficult. In other words, the problem for the American Left is that they have said the quiet part out loud. Rather than hiding behind the fig leaf of the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity, or arguing for time-limited, case-specific policies, many progressives are happy to call a quota a quota and see the fight against racism as a never-ending all-encompassing struggle.

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Critical Race Theory ignores anti-Semitism

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Take Ibram X Kendi, today’s prophet of anti-racism. He is explicit about prioritising group iniquities over discrimination against individuals. In fact, his whole approach is about tinkering with outputs rather than striving to treat people equally. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” he writes in How To Be Antiracist. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

To Kendi, equity is measured in terms of outcome, and has only been achieved “when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing”. By Kendi’s logic, not only is a system of explicit racial quotas not racist; it’s the only truly antiracist approach.

The Biden administration doesn’t express things in such hardline terms. But it nonetheless claims to be putting “equity”, and not equality, at the heart of everything it does. In an early executive order Biden defined equity as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment”. That may sound innocuous enough, but in reality it has so far meant numerous straightforwardly discriminatory policies.

And many of these measures have already run into legal roadblocks. In Wisconsin, a judge has halted a Department of Agriculture programme that allocates loan forgiveness on the basis of race. In Texas, a judge has ruled against a measure in the Covid relief bill that explicitly prioritised restaurant-owners of certain racial backgrounds.

The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last week was also infused with the logic of equity. For example, in the bidding for contracts to install solar power or reconfigure the roads in American cities, the government will prioritise minority and female-owned businesses. Legal challenges will surely follow.

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By Eric Kauffman

Perhaps a compromise can emerge. One option would be for an affirmative action approach focused on giving a leg up to Americans that really need it. Rather than engineering a cosmetic and subjective kind of diversity that keeps consciences clean and money flowing into the endowment pot, America’s elite colleges could positively discriminate in a more explicit but socially useful way. Richard Kahlenberg, an expert witness in the Harvard case, argues for socio-economic preference in college admissions, which would drop the offensive charade of personality assessments and target working-class blacks, hispanics and whites. It’d be a less dishonest, less divisive and almost certainly a more beneficial approach.

Meanwhile, if the Biden administration wants to target extra support at the neediest farmers, it need not pander to “equity” with openly discriminatory policies. Instead, it could simply… target the neediest farmers. Doing so would be fairer policy and better politics.

In the meantime, whether in the Harvard case or elsewhere, a legal and political collision seems inevitable. There has always been a tension between the more expansive policies born in the civil rights era, foremost among them affirmative action, and the kind of colour-blind creed consistent with the constitution and preached by Martin Luther King and others. But today’s combative and ascendant anti-racism is stretching that tension past its limit. It is a powerful dogma — but it could soon meet its match in the Supreme Court.