Why Affirmative Action Died, Why Not Sooner?

10 Reasons Why Affirmative Action Died

By: Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Signal, July 14, 2023

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise in the Supreme Court’s recent decision was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum?

Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

Second, affirmative action was imposed on the back end in adult hiring and college admissions. However, to achieve parity, remediation early at the K-12 school level would have been the only solution.

Yet such intervention was made impossible by teachers unions, the rise of identity politics, and government entitlements. All were opposed to school choice, self-help programs, critiques of cultural impediments, or restrictions on those blanket entitlements.

Third, class, the true barometer of privilege, was rendered meaningless. Surrealism followed. The truly privileged Barack and Michelle Obama as well as Meghan Markle lectured the country on its unfairness—as if they had it far rougher than the impoverished “deplorables” of East Palestine, Ohio.

Fourth, affirmative action supporters could never square the circle of proving that racial prejudices didn’t violate the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the text of the Constitution.

What they were left with was the lame argument that because long ago the 90% white majority had violated their own foundational documents, then such past bad unconstitutional bias could be rectified legitimately by present-day “good” unconstitutional bias.

Fifth, supporters never adequately explained why the sins of prior generations fell on their descendants who grew up in the post-civil rights era.

Nor could they account for why those who had never experienced institutionalized racism, much less Jim Crow apartheid or slavery, were to be compensated collectively for the suffering of long-dead individuals. No wonder 70% of Americans in many polls favored ending affirmative action, including half of African Americans.

Sixth, there never was a “rainbow” coalition of shared non-white victimhood—a concept necessary to perpetuate the premise of white privilege, supremacy, and rage, so integral to race-based reverse discrimination. More than a dozen ethnicities earn more per capita than do whites.

Asians have been subject to coerced internment, immigration restrictions, and zoning exclusions. Yet on average, they do better than whites economically and enjoy lower suicide rates and longer life expectancies.

The arguments for affirmative action never explained why Asians and other minorities who faced discrimination outperformed the majority white population. As a result, affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians on the premise they were too successful.

Seventh, no one ever explained when affirmative action was to apply. Blacks, for example, were vastly “overrepresented” in merit-based professional football and basketball. Yet no one demanded “proportional representation” to address such “disparate impact,” despite underrepresentation of all other demographics.

Yet if blacks were “underrepresented” in baseball, then reparatory measures were supposed to address that fact—even if Latino players were “overrepresented” and whites “underrepresented” as well. No one in our race-obsessed culture, of course, objected that white males died at twice their demographics in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eighth, in our increasingly intermarried mass-immigration society, few could adjudicate who was what, or much less what standard gave one racial preference. In lunatic fashion, pink, blond Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., became Harvard’s first “Native American” law professor due to her “high cheekbones.” Light-skinned Latinos were considered marginalized, while some darker Italians or Greeks were not.

Keep reading.