Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas. In assessing students not in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class, who are guaranteed admission, UT uses a “holistic” application review process with many factors, one of which is race “to achieve the educational needs of a diverse student body,” said UT President Bill Powers.
Most of the opponents of UT’s affirmative action policy, in hailing the court’s decision to hear the case, have declared they oppose affirmative action due to their support for racial equality.
“The only way to usher in true racial equality in America is to end race-based discrimination,” asserted Stephen Balch, chairman of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), an organization that signed a friend-of-the-court brief for the case. “There are many race-neutral ways of promoting equal opportunity on our college campuses, and we urged the court to choose these instead.”
NAS joined the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), the American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI), and Project 21 in signing the brief produced by the Pacific Legal Foundation. In addition to positing that UT’s admissions policy violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the brief argues that the existing policies ominously allow “government to adopt race-conscious measures without giving serious, good faith consideration to less restrict race-neutral policies.”
In reviewing the language used in this case and really the whole argument over affirmative action over the last decade, there has emerged a false dialectic, pivoting at the axis of the conflict. Supporters have defended the 2003 high court ruling, Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed narrowly focused “race-conscious” admissions methods to achieve racial diversity. Meanwhile, opponents, like the NAS, have called for “race-neutral” methods to replace “race-conscious” methods, which they consider unconstitutional “racial preferences” in admissions.
The false dialect: race-consciousness verses race neutrality. In the United States, there is no such thing as race neutrality, just like there is no such thing as color blindness and post-racialism. There is no such thing as a race-neutral admissions policy. Race neutrality, particularly in the college admissions process, is a fallacy. It does not exist. It has never existed in higher education.
All of the seemingly traditional “race-neutral” admissions considerations are in fact race-conscious.
