Pushing.
I'm Khalil Jibrad Muhammad.
I'm Ben Austin. We are two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are.
Some of my best friends are in this show. We wrestle with the challenges.
And the absurdities of a deeply divided, separate, and unequal country. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the American school system from K through higher education. Today we're talking about the recent Supreme Court decision banning race based affirmative action in higher education and what that means for the future.
And oh man, that's right. And we have someone on the show that couldn't be better to speak with, our friend, Anarema Bargava. Honarema has this amazing pedigree. She served in the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice during the Obama administration, focusing on education issues, and before that, she also worked on education at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And Honareima was actually at the Supreme Court hearings when this affirmative action case was being argued, so she knows
what she's talking about. And she also happens to be an old friend, Honorema, grew up two blocks for me in my neighborhood, and she went to our high school, Kinwood Academy. You know, it always comes back to Chicago.
That's right.
Anarema is going to tell us about what she calls the setup behind this case and the campaign to keep our country essentially segregated, or at least to take us back to the quote unquote good old days based on this ruling.
So let's get to it.
Let's go.
We got in a fish and him.
All right, an Arima, welcome to Some of my best friends.
Are so excited to be here with you, and.
It's like a homecoming for real, because we you and I, we go way back to when we were we were shorties. There were days after school when I was a little one and I, since we grew up in the same neighborhood, I would get taken back to your house for after school. And I just want to say that my after school snacks at my house, like I would make myself a bowl of cereal, and if I was really ambitious, I would fry up some sizzeline and at your house, at
your house, your mom made homemade somosis. Wow, it was crazy.
Every day, every day she made tomosas for you whenever you showed up.
It was like a daily, daily practice.
I was a little bit more of a shorty than you were, because I remember, well, I told the story all through high school, which is that I said that you and your brother baby sat me. It might have just been your brother, but this was a really important story for me to tell everyone that I you know, I got to spend some time with Ben Austin when I was when I was a kid, quality time getting babysat and eating somosas.
Because I was like the big man on campus.
I was like, you know, I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about, you know, the big man on campus moment.
I feel like Khalil might get a little bit.
Jealous or sad here, so I just I'll just say maybe maybe maybe, yeah.
Yeah, Well that he was. He was much cooler than I was.
And now that I know he was, he was eating somosa's even more uh more in the in the in the know than I was. So look, we all went to the best high school in America, you know, hands down, Kinwood Academy, home of the Broncos and uh, you know this. This is a public high school. It's on the South side of Chicago.
We've talked about.
It on our show many many times. Majority black student population, but obviously we had some white kids, we had some Jewish kids, but we haven't talked that much about our Asian population. And turns out that some of our best friends from high school from Kenwood we're also of Asian descent, in your case an arena South Asian. So like, what was it like to be a student, you know, in this black, white world as as a little girl with a crush or a young woman I should say, with a crush on Ben.
Not the last part.
I didn't do that part.
I was talking.
We all know how that works, right, it's my friend who who has the crush?
I get it.
I get it, you do.
I mean I might have had another few crushes in your class.
So I'll leave it. I'll leave it that.
We can talk about that some other day.
I will.
I will say it made us. There weren't that many South Asian students around. I mean, there weren't that many kids on the South Side. He was South Asian or and the kids who were coming in to Kenwood. A lot of the Asian kids, I think, were coming from across the city, and so I think in some ways we got to be whoever we wanted to be, right, So you kind of got to flow through because people didn't know exactly what to do with you other than
your mom made somosas. And you know, my brother used to get called Gandhi all the time because I was the only you know, Indian person ever anyone had ever heard of.
It didn't feel like we were different.
It just felt like we were We were learning about each other and we had something you know, strange and different to contribute to that.
Yeah, yeah, you know, that's that's that's kind of my experience too, meaning that I don't remember a lot of students of Asian descent, whether East Asian or South Asian or API in the broadest sense. I remember a few, like in my classes. And Ben's going to be totally embarrassed by me telling this story, but I had a classmate in a in a speech class, actually was an acting class. It was drama, and he had an accent.
He was probably Filipino descent, and one day we were all doing improv and sort of the prompt was like, you know, he had to say something equivalent. Ben is shaking his head, like bad day, but it came out
bad day. And for years Ben and I kind of like if we had a bad day, we adopted his Filipino accents, and like, there's all kind of fucked up about it, right, But like, if I'm being honest, it was partly the foreignness of this Filipino kid in a black, white school that kind of made the accent stick out and then became a kind of inside joke between us when we actually used.
The word like, yo, how was your day?
I had, you know, he would say it or I would say it anyway. I think, you know, if this show's going to be true to itself and if we're going to talk about these issues in a world that is really crazy right now, and the topic that we're talking about, you know, I got to own my own my own ship, and that that great high school that we all went to CLO.
I think we all had it.
I mean, there are all kinds of stereotypes about people of every background, right, and I think in some ways it was it was good that we had a few because you could kind of the part that I did like was that you kind of represent and wander, so you didn't have you know, the Indian kid that people call Gandhi also did graffiti and you know, and swear and got himself in trouble and was walking around and
you know. So that's that's the part that that you break up the stereotypes, right and and you need that because otherwise you only know the accents and and whatever it is that you got on TV.
Yeah, so this gets that zan Rima to the to what we're talking about today, which is diversity and the recent Supreme Court decision which got rid of affirmative action
as far as a decision in college admissions. And we want to hear more about like your career trajectory and the work you've done as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP, with the Obama Justice Department that really working on cases just like this, And can you talk about sort of the really like the decades of work you've done that give context for this moment on affirmative action.
So I think it all comes back to Kenwin. I think I went into college thinking I was going to be a doctor like most Indian kids, and you know, I didn't do so well in organic chemistry.
So that was the end of that.
And then, you know, I think about how extraordinary all these people we grew up with are, right, And you know, there were people who would wrap in the hallways, and the way they understood the world and the way they talked about the world was smarter than anything else I had come across, right, just just to be able to take it all in and figure it out in a moment, right, And and so that's the my friends growing up from from those who weren't sure where their parents were, were
sometimes homeless, some of whom you know, grew up in very difficult circumstances, some of the most you know, extraordinary seers of what was going on around us.
Those those are the folks who should have had the.
Same shots that I did, right, And and we went to the same high school. But I had parents who were middle class parents who had all kinds of opportunities that I got because of that, And and so I I think that's why I wanted to do something in education.
Can I pause you on that, Aama for a second, Yes, because I think you're saying something that is really relevant to the to the larger conversation we have so you're basically saying that out of the experience of being part of a small minority meaning an Indian a descendant kid in a largely black white school, like for you, diversity was a win win win, meaning you came to see
kids in this space where you're learning. When you said the word seers like you could you're sort of learning from people because their diversity was on full view from your perspective, they were very much not like you. And you're saying that you partly in college discovered that You're like, hey, I want to make sure there as many schools in this country that replicate the kind of experience I had.
Is that is that what you're saying in terms of like translating your own personal experience into your career choice.
Yes, and in the sense that it's not that they were not like me, it's that they were like me right and in some ways so much better than me right in terms of what they had to navigate and
the ways in which they found to navigate it. We joke about this, but like we used to sit outside, y'all did too, right, playing force squear and having conversations, and it was back to the place where like the most like the way you would learn with those conversations after school about all kinds of stuff, about music, about you know, what was going on in the world, was going down down the street, and you start to learn about how the world works that way, like that's that's your education.
And to remind I want I want to jump ahead to say your years in the in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, describe some of the cases that you're working on and sort of what that means for affirmative action.
Sure, so I'm working let me let me start with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and then to the Justice Department. And in both places, the bulk, like hundreds of cases were about segregation in schools around the country, and and the fact that there are cases that had been around longer than I've been alive about you know, the ways in which schools were still you know, could you could map them in places on different sides of train tracks, all black or all white? And how opportunities map that way?
Right? So the reason I wanted to do.
Those kinds of cases is because we spend so much time thinking about outcomes, like like how did you know how our kids doing on tests? But these were cases about like the fundamentals, like do you actually have a building, do you have teachers, do you have staff? You know, do you have the resources for students who the only difference between them is race in some cases in class, right, and they have a very different educational experience, you know,
in nearby areas, right. And so I think about all the ways in which we learned from each other. We learned what unites us by being in class together in high school. But it was also the kind of resources that we ended up having being at one of the few high schools in Chicago that was out of a magnet high school, right.
So both things really.
Drove the kind of work we were doing in the Justice Department and at the Legal Defense.
Funt So, the vast majority of schools in the nation are still almost completely segregated, Like seventy five percent of students go to either an all white school or in all black school. And what you're saying too is they're not just separate, but they're still separate and unequal.
We are separate and unequal, and we are at a place where our pools across the country are as segregated as they were in nineteen seventy and so all of the things that we were trying to talk about in America today that we had a chance to do differently at Kenwood.
If we are.
Separated, we look at people who are different from ourselves and we've never been in spaces with them.
So what do we go to.
We go to fear, we go to the unknown, we go to those type of things. And I think that's the thing that I'm really and now continue to be worried about, which is the more segregated we are, the more we create the breeding grounds for fear, for hate, for divides.
Yeah, that's exactly right, Anna Rima. So we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about this recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action and a really poor forecast.
For the future of this country. We'll be right back after the break.
We are back on. Some of my best friends are with one of our best friends on Arima Bargava on Arema, you are the perfect person to talk to us about the recent Supreme Court affirmative action decision, and could you please sum up for us what just happened? What is the students for fair Admissions versus Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
So I'm going to start with the decisions and what the court came down and said, and then I'll go to what this is all about, because.
It's a really big setup. That's a really big setup.
Well, I did say I did say some up.
So I'm going to sum up.
I'm going to sum up the setup.
That's what's going to happen here, and I'm going to.
Talk about the way that the justices justices fell into
the setup. So let me just start by saying this, this decision, like Justice sot to my or and Justice Jackson talked about, lack any kind of coherence, like it's ahistorical, it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't make that much sense legally, because really what this is about is there are interests that we have, and one of the interests that we have in America is to actually have people be in diverse spaces, to talk about the way in which that's a strength that we can take account
of race in very limited and narrow ways to try and create spaces that are diverse. And that was something that that schools were able to do for the last many many years that's been court decision In two thousand and three out of the University of Michigan, there were two decisions about how you could actually take account of race in the context of higher education. And what the court basically said back then was we're going to give
colleges some leeway. And let me be clear, we're only talking about when we' talking about higher education, we're only talking about about two hundred colleges and universities are actually selective, which means they take less than fifty percent of students.
And so this is a case every other school like pretty you can of most schools, you apply and you can get in, like they need students.
Yeah, yes, they want you.
They want you, they want your money, they want you to get there, right, and so so so we're talking about about two hundred college and universities and of those that these cases are about two of the most elite Harvard and the University of North Carolina, one private, one public.
Oldest private and oldest public. They were chosen probably very strategically here, they.
Were absolutely chosen. So this is this is these are cases about how do we describe merit? You know, is what is our definition of who is meritorious to be able to get into elite spaces, which has.
A long history in American law.
But more importantly, they're much more about humanity, right, which is, how do we actually think about the many talents and the many things that people bring, things like judgment and the kind of obstacles and what I was talking about a Kenwood, all these students who were able to overcome so many different things.
And so what the.
Supreme Court saying is, you can look at every factor
about a student except for their race everything else. And then they did some weird things, right, which they said, well, actually you can look at everything and you know, butt race, But if a student wants to write an essay about race, and you know, for example, I'm I love black comic books like I love the new series that came out about Wakanda in comic book style, right, and the only thing you can talk about about that is that they love comic books, and not about the fact that they,
you know, maybe black and that resonates with them. There was a real concern that these decisions would actually say you can't talk about your own stories. I mean, you can't talk about your experiences. They didn't quite go that far. But the second thing they do is, you know, back to that the way I started. When there's something really important, like a compelling interest, which is the way the legal world talks about it, like diversity, can you still pursue that?
And the answer from the court is the way I read it, Yes, But the court says, hey, we're not institutionally competent to figure out whether or not you've actually gotten the benefits of.
Diversity, So we don't know.
There's no way to sort of measure that, and we don't know how to concretely measure it. And so because of that, we're going to say you can't really consider race. Well, of course you can't measure it. How could you possibly measure what it is that the benefits that the three of us got from being able to go to school together, Like, there's there's no way to be able to think about that. And so the big answer is they took out race
as a factor and for for people to consider. And the only place we think it can still go on is the military. And so this is the one exception, which is they say you can you can take account of diversity with account to the military, and as just as Jackson notes, it's basically saying like, we want black and brown kids.
To go to the bunker, but not to the boardroom, right.
And an Arima, you're you're I mean you You've laid out so many things, and you know this idea that we're like post civil rights, post racial which is part of of Chief Justices Robert's argument that we don't need this anymore, And all of your work of showing just how segregated and unequal the country is still it's just such a farce.
Can I add one thought on this? I am upset about what you just described. I mean, the disadvantage, the privilege, the segregated schools, the lack of resources, the pathways to dead ends, all of it.
It's all there.
But look, the Constitution does not protect or guarantee class equality.
The Constitution doesn't give us shit.
About poor people. It doesn't care about opportunity structures they have. So there is actually some basis for the Court to say, we don't care about legacy, we don't care about white privilege, and we understand that it can be passed on, but that is not what we're solving for here.
So the problem we have because of the.
Supreme Court decision, this notion that the Constitution guarantees colorblindness, but there is no amendment for poor people's rights in this legacy debate, whether they happen to be black or South Asian or Latino or anything when it comes to getting into college.
So this is where the Constitution ends up playing out in really perverse ways.
Right.
So what the Supreme Court and others have said, right is that class is not something that we are is protected in America. So if you're poor, as you just said, if you're poor, you are lower income, you don't have the kind of wealth that other people around you might have. There's there's no you know, sort of ways in which we try to address you being discriminated against, or if there are barriers about that, or there's opportunities you don't
have because of your class. That's not something that the Constitution is worried about. On the flip side, it says if if things map because of race, if you're discriminating against because of race, or if you want to take race into account in some ways, we're actually going to apply the hardest legal standard to that. Whenever race comes into play, We're going to look at it really, really closely, and so it just ends up being a strange We're
in a strange place to begin with. And then just to put this in there, what Chief Jofice Justice Roberts does, which is just extreme, you know, it's mind boggling again, which is what he says is it doesn't really matter if you're using race in a way to benefit people or to discriminate or harm people. What he's saying is, you know, you can't stop discrimination on the basis of race by discriminating on the basis of race. That's coming from another decision in two thousand and seven about a
diversity in K through twelve schools. So he said that that then, and he's what he says here is anytime you're using race, someone might benefit, but someone's gonna lose, and so you can't use it.
Right.
This is where the USUS Jackson and Justice Soda Mayor are just like, what world are you in? Because you're basically saying, we are in a society that is mapped by race, and then you have to be color blind, right, and then you have to be colored blind. And so that is what you're getting from Chief Justice Roberts is basically a complete lack of regard to the way in which race still has a role in all kinds of
measurable and concrete ways in America. Right, He's just ignoring all of it and saying, yeah, just in this one moment, we don't want to use race because it makes us feel icky, right, But we're not talking about the fact that everything that leads up to that moment, from pre k to twelfth grade, the ways that play race plays out into whether or not you even have a shot
at that admissions moment. We're just going to ignore all that because we just want to make sure that one little moment is colorblind.
Right right, all right, anarema. You said that this case actually used Asian American students as part of the lawsuit, and that they were being discriminated against places like Harvard where they make up about twenty nine percent of the students, and the idea that there could be even be more. I'm interested. You were in the courtroom when these cases were heard. Can you describe, like, who is actually who the plaintiffs were, what they look like racially? Even so, I was in.
The Supreme Court when the Harvard and UNC cases were argued, and I was in the first row of the Supreme Court bar section, which means I'm basically in their first world of the courtroom, and in front of me arguing for Chinese students were six white men. So Students for Fair Admission says they have about twenty thousand.
Members, but they don't tell you who those members are.
And throughout the entirety of the Harvard case, there is not one Asian student who came out to testify in court about the discrimination that they experienced. So the plaintiff here is not Asian or Chinese students. It is this organization we don't know who the members are, that is led by a guy named Ed Bloom, And Ed Bloom is someone who has been bringing cases challenging voting rights, challenging the ways in which race has a role in trying to promote quality in America in all different parts
of our lives. And so this is just when I say it's a setup. You're setting it up by talking about, as we talk, the oldest elite private and public university. You're trying, because there has been many attempts to sort of have this be on behalf of white students. They went to that old trope dividing conquer. Let's try to figure out a way to pit communities of color against each other and to have you know, if the if the blame comes down, it's not going to go to
white people. It's not going to go to those legacy or donor communities, right, or students. It's going to go to Chinese students or other API students for being the reason that in some ways affirmative action or the consideration of race got brought down, right, And so this is this is this is old, old tropes that go back to even you know, in the Supreme Court one hundred years ago, when there were a lot of cases around
who's white in America? And you see, you know, different people, different racial and ethnic backgrounds trying to demonstrate that they're white and and by they demonstrate it by trying to, you know, show how they're different from other people of color.
So when you think about the Court that day, it's just another example of our communities being used to to for some people to hold power and to continue their grip on power in this country and on the narrati, and so we end up in a situation where we're trying to fit their narrative.
And so this you know.
The thing that just struck me in court is that you have Justice Clarence Thomas sitting there over and over go and being like, you know, I don't know what this diversity thing.
Is, Like I don't know what it means.
And I'm like, first of all, y'all came up with it, like the Supreme Court isn't want it, came up with it. And secondly, I just wanted someone to look at him and be like, I don't know, you tell me, it's the only reason you're here, like at some level, like
it's just the idea that you're questioning. You know, the very ways in which you've set up the structure and the system, and you've benefited from it, you know, like Clarace Thomas has benefited from the very thing that he doesn't know what it is or how it exists, right, you.
Know, Anoreima, I just want to clarify here that Justice Thomas did, in fact get into Yale in nineteen seventy one, and this is the same year they started an affirmative action program. So there is no question that the guy who's been the only person of color on the bench for nearly twenty years benefited directly from affirmative action. But
here's the interesting thing. His dislike of affirmative action is precisely because he took it personal that people could question whether he qualified to get into Yale, and so he has seen affirmative action as a stigma that is attached to black people, which is unfair. It's his own personal commitment. In this Supreme Court decision, he actually makes the argument that by getting rid of any form of racial discrimination in his own language that even would help black people,
he is upholding the truest principle of equality. He sees himself as the true vanguard of racial equality in America. I mean, it's just absolutely bizarre, because of course, at the end of the day, you'd have to whitewash or make disappear all of the systemic racism it still exists in our country.
You know, I didn't do what Coyle did, which is I didn't bother to spend my time reading Justice Thomas's opinion because I'm not going to sit here and try and understand how you could cast something like Brown versus about Board of Education as a moment of color blindness. Brown versus Board of Education was a moment of extraordinary recognition of the ways in which race has mapped. You know what kind of opportunity we have, the ways in
which has played out in terms of segregation. And so for us, as Thomas, to say anything different about you know, what the law says, or the Constitution says, or even what Brown says, is something that again is trying to all of a sudden we cast words in ways that have the most limited meaning and don't mean anything in terms of how we actually live and learn and educate and love and promote something different in the world today.
So, Anoreema, I mean, obviously I think this is personal for all of us, you know, in this conversation in same and maybe even slightly different ways. I know, for me, I had a numberumber of Asian American students who I was teaching at the time that Harvard first won the case in the Lower courts, and so there's been an ongoing conversation on the Harvard campus. There's been organizing, and one of the things I was struck by was diversity
amongst the AAPI community. Many of my students, who often self select into a course which I teach about the history of racism, saw this for what you and I would agree was a setup, a way of further dismantling the opportunity structures in this country to deny and erase the history of racism and the ongoing problem systemic racism. But for other students on campus, who sometimes indexed as first generation Chinese immigrant students, there was this sense of
we are defending meritocracy. We want the system to work this way. Colorblind, I mean within your community, and I'm speaking specifically here of Asian American community, is their diversity? I mean, did you have to have arguments with people you know or one degree removed from folks you know about this issue.
So to close question, yes, there's diversity, And I think part of it goes to this very question that Ben posed about, like what's the definition of merit? And if you and we define merit based on test scores, right, which is in the in the in the Asian American community, and frankly in a lot of communities in which, like you know, there's this idea of test scores or how you do in terms of your grades being the measure
of your worth. What happens when we tell people that test scores and your grades are what you are worth which we know are heavily, if not, you know, almost exclusively influenced by things like wealth and income. Right, you know, whether or not you can take a test prep course, whether or not you're able to actually even have the opportunity to learn. In New York City schools, you know, most kids don't even have the opportunity to learn the things that are being tested on to get into sort
of specialized elite high schools. Right, They're not learning it. And so the only way to get there is to be able to, you know, take a test prep course or be in a private school. And so when you say you sit there and thinking about that, you're like, this is this is this is the first.
Problem of merit.
Then those are problems of how we see ourselves, right, and do we see ourselves as those who are part of a larger community, right, in which we have a lot that unites us with people who are different than us.
And this is where, you know, I'll go again back to Kenwood, which is, you know, that's what I got the privilege and the honor of learning early, which is to go to an elementary school on the South side of Chicago that was largely black, and to go to a high school that was largely black, right, and to recognize that there are so much the stories that we are being told about ourselves are not actually the reality of of of who we are and how weird and nerdy and strange, you know, the two of you and
the rest of us have been, you know, like that's that's that's actually true, right, And we need to be able to celebrate that in and celebrate ourselves in all of all of the things that we're worthy of being, right and and not just narrow ourselves to test scores and GPA. And that's what these cases we're trying to do is suggest that that's the only thing that we
need to be sort of measuring people on. And So this is a setup because not only because it's Harvard and U and C. Not only because it was Asian American students, not only because it's divide and conquer, but in a moment in America in which you know, there's an image that's trying to be created, right of all of us fighting amongst ourselves, and this not being a moment of white people really trying to hold on the
power and to erase in some ways our stories. Outside of these concrete, measurable things that they say we have to demonstrate, all right, and.
To remember, we're going to take a quick break, we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what this decision means for the future. I also want to say when you said our high school is weird, strange and nerdy, that you pointed at Khalil when you said nerdy. We'll be right back after the break.
I was looking at you, though, I was looking at you.
So look, Ben, I had a theory.
It was a light bulb moment just before the last break that the nuttiness of this decision, it turns out, had nothing to do with Chief Justice John Roberts or Clarence Thomas.
It was chat GPT.
Chat GPT wrote this decision that explained everything, because of course, AI only knows what the Constitution says. It doesn't know anything about all this soft and squishy stuff like bias and stereotype thread and systemic racism because guess what, we live in a country that doesn't keep track of racism. There are no benchmarks on racism. Hell, the Supreme Court
doesn't even recognize racial dispair as evidence of racism. So of course artificial intelligence wrote this Supreme Court decision, man, oh man, that explains everything.
And Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas is so lazy man saying that he's race.
My daughter Justice said no, He's spoken the least of any justice ever and is also the longest servance justice ever.
Painfully all right, maybe maybe, okay, let's talk about what this decision means for the future. For the future, first of college admissions and the racial makeup of classrooms. All right, So we know that schools still want to like have diverse classrooms, most of the of these elite schools do. And you know, let's think about other proxies for race that they might use, and what are some other implications of this.
So my view is that the two hundred selective colleges and universities that we're talking about are going to figure this out, right, and they're going to figure it out in a whole bunch of ways in which they've already been working. And there have been nine states across America that already were in a position where they couldn't take account of race, and the way that this Preme Court just ruled you can't. So we have some places where people have been looking at this and so other ways
in which we can think about opening up pathways. It can be everything from looking at students, neighborhoods, opportunity indexes. There's lots of ways to do this. I think the more important part about these cases are what they are trying to signal, right, And and as Clill knows well, there there are efforts around this country, in Florida and Texas most prominently, to to really erase the ways in
which rape race plays a role in our societies. You know, we can we can talk about Juneteenth, but we can't teach it. And we know that this this decision is already being used by a lot of people, not only in those two states but around the country for something that it doesn't even say, right, I mean, it doesn't say that that all of a sudden, this means you can't you know, you can't teach certain things, or you can't you can't look at thing like black history, but
people are going to use it that way. It doesn't say that you can have diversity, equity inclusion programs, but people are going to try to use it that way.
And so this is this is like, this is a decision that some people were waiting for just so they could say, Hey, we're done with this whole post George Floyd diversity moment we were having, and and we want to again hold on to power in terms of white communities in the way that we have for a long time, and don't want to have to go and engage with people.
That's what that's what these cases are going to are being wielded as a tool for.
Whether or not they're actually what this was about. And again, this was really about higher education selective, very narrow set of circumstances.
But but it's going.
To be used to to really question our freedom to learn and our freedom to be ourselves.
Yeah, yeah, well I love you mentioning freedom to learn, which some people know has been an effort to push back against all the anti coracier legislation around the country.
This decision sits squarely within a larger moment that is pushing back against every effort to deal with the unfinished problems of the civil rights movement, which is to say, the problems of the systemic racism, the problems of redlining, the problems of a criminal justice system that nobody would disagree has shown time and time again to have explicit evidence of racist bias in the treatment of black defendants
compared to their white counterparts. Part of what is articulated in this decision is a very clear notion that any form of race consciousness is unconstitutional. And so to your point that first today it's affirmative action, Tomorrow it will be DEI, tomorrow will be minority scholarships, it might even be a lawsuit to go after funding for HBCUs as
inherently discriminatory. I mean, I'm not trying to see ideas for these people, but I mean that's how capacious The underlying logic of this decision is.
Should we be that afraid? Ana Marima? Am i am I exaggerating?
We should absolutely be that afraid, because what's behind this is an idea for us to believe that America is not big enough for us all to succeed, right. The idea behind all this is to say that in order for somebody to be able to thrive, somebody else is being harmed, right, And so if we're always at each other's throats, that's like, that's where you get the division
that we're seeing in America today. And so not only do we see this real effort to divide us and to suggest everybody that we're always always competing or for survival, you know, against people who are of different races in us. Right, But it's also exactly what you just said. This is absolutely not about finding a solution. If it was about finding a solution, you would do you would try to find a solution and the easiest way possible to get
to where you want to get to. If we want to we get to a place where our institutions are places where people can thrive, you know, according to their talent, then we would do we would continue to have ways in which we account for people's racial experiences and the
kind of obstacles they faced. So what we're doing here is like making this just a hell of a lot harder and suggesting that any consideration of race is a problem, is something that we should be afraid of, and the only thing that's going to do is to make us more afraid and more divided.
Yeah, I just want to underline some of the things you guys are saying that I'm hearing that it does matter who gets into these two hundred elite schools in a lot of ways, but now it actually has real ramifications for who might be in a workplace. And then it is also a signal. It's indicative of what's going on in the country. I mean, I think about what Justices Roberts and Thomas said, you know, of denying what's happening in the reality of the present and the past,
and that's exactly what you guys are saying. That's what's going on in terms of race in the country right now. We can't talk about the realities of discrimination or inequality, and we're not honest about our past, and that is written into these majority decisions. It's right there.
Yeah. Yeah, the paradigm of color blindness is coming back with a vengeance. I mean, we've got Republican primary candidates for whom this is like the key talking point. You know,
we need color blindness. The Governor Ron de Santis redefined diversity, equity, and inclusion down in Florida as color blindness, merit and equality, which you know, in a way, and here's the irony for me as a historian, like the plus versus Ferguson decision made the argument that in terms of political equality and civil equality civil rights equality, black people were equivalent, but they were fundamentally inferior, and that the Constitution had
no no obligation to ensure social equality when one race be inferior to another. And it seems to me that when this current regime of quote unquote color blindness is resurging, part of the argument is if you are in a poor, dilapidated school system, if you happen to be in a red line zip code and you happen to be inferior as a result of it, there is nothing the Constitution
can do to help you. That is the underlying logic of this, and it basically leaves us fighting with the same tiny, tiny weapons that folks had back one hundred years ago, you know, fifty years before the civil rights movement, when they just had to start one little litigation strategy at a time.
Hello, it's actually worse than what you say, because it's not even just saying that the Constitution on the law can't do anything about it. It's suggesting that it right. And so the idea that we're saying that the Constitution and law shouldn't address the very fundamental inequalities, that it shouldn't do that, and not just that it can't, is
part of what you're getting from this decision. It's just like, you know, we're just going to try to blind eye to it at a moment in American history where we are as segregated as we were in nineteen seventy and we're seeing the kind.
Of divides that are fueling the kind.
Of hate and insurrection that we are experiencing in places across the nation.
Yeah, I mean talk about coming full circle that essentially our ability to understand and be with each other is the only thing that ultimately will save us from everything that we see happening in this country right now.
So we are so happy that you.
Came on, Ana Rima, truly one of our best friends from back in the day, right on.
Thank you, Ron Arima, Thank you Bob oh Man.
Aside from being scared to death about what's coming down the pike in this country, I have to say, like, you know, there was another version of affirmative action from back in the day.
I didn't even realize.
At a majority black school with all these handsome black guys like myself, here you are like this, you know, tall handsome Jewish guy who's getting you know, all these people crushing on you.
Man. Affirmative action full effect. You know, but definitely.
Affirm affirming action.
That's funny, all right, man, I love you, I love you too.
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