Following up on yesterday's post, this NYT article makes clear that "color blindness" was not the point of Brown v. Board of Education: race was used to denigrate and subordinate the disfavored race, that was the problem. The use of race to advantage the subordinated race was not even on the table as a topic, for rather obvious reasons to anyone aware of the reality of race in American in the 1950s or the 1860s.
Despite that, it's clear that diversity blather has exhausted itself (even in popular opinion), and produced a pathologically dishonest discussion of admissions and hiring in higher education. We were much better off with the "quota" system that Bakke struck down (and which many other countries use), where it was absolutely clear what the goals were, which led to much less lying about the supposed "academic qualifications" of candidates.
That system was also justified on grounds that were related to some realities: e.g., rectifying a long history of explicit racial discrimination, and providing "role models" with salient (and stereotypically denigrated) demographic attributes that were visible to everyone for students with those same attributes . There was something to be said on behalf of both those considerations, even if Marxist objections are basically correct.
The main obstacle now is that there is a huge class of "diversity" beneficiaries in higher education with an entrenched interest in the maintenance of the myth. The real question, now, is how they, and their allies, will respond when "diversity" is no longer a lawful consideration. My guess is the response will not be much different than the response to the illegality of racial preferences in hiring that we have discussed previously. There will, I am sure, be a lot more litigation. At some point, those fixated on racial and ethnic demographics in higher education will have to confront the fact that the pathologies of capitalism are the actual issue.
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