We are all equal again, right?

[Dill]

(06-30-2023, 09:45 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: With the Supreme Court ruling against the use of race as a factor in college admission, essentially striking down affirmative action, nobody will have to endure discrimination based upon their race or ethnic origin or be the beneficiary of special treatment or conditions because of their race or ethnicity, correct?

Looks like we’ve got a good discussion going here, and I’d like to address some specific posts, but before I do, I’d like to drop in a little historical background on race in U.S. education. If the post is too long for anyone, don’t complain—just skip it.
 
In the 1920s, as U.S. educators turned more and more to sociological method, AND absorbed industrial standards of “efficiency,” they adopted prevailing racial theory to conflate biological difference and ethnicity to produce an “efficient” tracking system based on “racial” hierarchy, e.g., high school for northern Europeans, middle school for Eastern and Southern Europeans, full grade school for Hispanics, and the first few grades (or none) for blacks. This was applied largely in urban centers.

By the late 30s and 40s, the aggregate data on students defined by “race” began to produce correlations between student educational attainment and family wealth across race, with two exceptions—children of teachers and children of clergy.

This correlation began the gradual shift from “race” to home/community environment as the prime predictor of educational achievement, and a key to improving educational scores. It was this movement which eventually produced the arguments and data which decided Brown vs. Board in 1954.

This got interesting in the 50s and 60s. As college-level educators in the South saw the end of legal segregation approaching (along with informal segregation in the North), some quickly realized that they could stall or minimize integration by suddenly shifting to merit-based arguments relying on test scores. Given the correlation between wealth and school success, the “color-blind” tests could be expected to produce about the same results as legal segregation. 

By the 80s, while the end of legal segregation and institution of AA greatly helped, the aggregate underperformance of blacks in school continued, and educators continued to address it, rightly seeing it as a product of a legacy of political and economic discrimination—not natural inferiority.

But some right wingers who had opposed equality in the 60s adopted new tactics in the post-segregation era; e.g., Buckleyites gathered around his National Review, began discussing the “problem” of “reverse racism” and falsely claiming that AA perverted MLK’s dream of a color blind America.
Educators who continued to address the racial gap through curricular and policy changes, and support of AA, were accused of “soft” racism--i.e., their continued support for AA and for special classroom considerations for Blacks meant they thought Blacks naturally, biologically inferior to whites. THAT’S why they thought Blacks “needed help.”  So they were the "real" racists now and those Buckley conservatives who wanted a colorblind society were the true heirs of king--even if they had formerly opposed the civil rights movement. People who really believed in equality believed that blacks could make it on their own now, with help from THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. 

This view of AA-supportive educators became widely embraced by the right, and made its way into George W.’s speech to the NAACP about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Current styling of CRT as a new form of racism carries this tendency forward.

Most Americans are still unaware of the correlation between wealth and educational attainment/opportunity, and the historical legacy which deprived an entire race of wealth building for centuries.  And so it would never occur to them that “meritocracy” could be (and once had been) advanced to achieve segregationist goals or to preserve white privilege when the law no longer could. Recalling this history is not intended to link forum members, mostly youngsters to me, to pre-90s politics. You aren’t like a segregationist dean at the U of Texas in 1955 if, in 2023, you affirm merit as a criterion for college admission. And many who once supported the GOP colorblind line have now turned against it, recognizing what it covered.

But those who laid the ground work for the AA ruling were intimately aware of this history--which legal arguments worked and which didn't. And to what purpose. Tomorrow I'll throw out a few words on "diversity," which is also being excluded from education in the Florida Model.