Outrage over affirmative action ruling
By Brittney Cooper
I couldn’t let this day pass without sharing my deep disappointment and frankly my utter outrage that the Supreme Court has chosen to outlaw affirmative action. It’s not that I was surprised by their decision. Even when we are not surprised by the slaughter to which we are being marched, we still have the right to be incensed.
I’m a proud recipient of affirmative action programs, and I reject all shame related to the way we tell the story about them. One of the problems is that some people believe affirmative action programs are designed to give unqualified people access to jobs and educational opportunities that they do not deserve, when the opposite is true.
Affirmative action programs were created to redress a system that kept otherwise qualified people from being able to access educational and job opportunities based on their race. Unfortunately, since the Bakke case in 1978, we have lived through several decades of white people who are anti-affirmative action completely shifting this narrative; they took programs that were designed to address the outgrowths of white supremacy and made them out to be programs that discriminate against white people. It’s complete and total [bull crap], it has always been [bull crap], and we should call it out as such.
I’m a proud recipient of affirmative action programs, and I reject all shame related to the way we tell the story about them.
When I say that I’m a proud recipient of affirmative action, that means in part that I was a TRIO baby. [The federal TRIO programs, including those described below, make education more accessible to underserved students.]
Because I came from a first-generation, working-class household, I went to an Upward Bound program when I was a high school student. When I went to undergraduate school, I was a Ronald E. McNair scholar, the federal program to support first-generation college students and others from under-resourced backgrounds who want to go on to get Ph.D.s, like the program’s namesake, Ronald E. McNair, an astronaut and a Ph.D.
When I went to get my Ph.D. I had what was initially called a minority graduate fellowship. It was designed to acknowledge the idea that having diverse applicants matters for the quality of one’s education, but also that many of us who were first generation students did not come with access to money from our parents, so we needed additional support.
Those things were true for me. And what was also true for me was that I had to apply to those programs. I had to take the test. I had to meet a minimum baseline to be considered for admission. I had to go through a rigorous interview process, and then I still had to go on to get the actual Ph.D. and then to get the job.
These programs gave me access to opportunities that I otherwise would have been walled out of because of my race and class. What Black people lack is not capacity, not ability, but often opportunity.
Our country has robbed us of opportunity for many centuries, and so it needs to spend many centuries making up for the opportunities it stole. It is only right.
Diversity and merit
The second problem with this affirmative action conversation is that it pits diversity against merit. Any time I’m talking to powerful corporate actors about what they’re going to do about their diversity programs, they immediately start talking about how they “want the most qualified applicants.” Which means that, subtly, they see diverse applicant pools as less meritorious than less-diverse applicant pools. The easiest way to say it is they think that the more white an applicant pool is, the more meritorious it is, and that the more diverse an applicant pool is, the less quality it has.
Now let’s say for the sake of argument that that were true, that somehow you had less qualifications in a more-diverse applicant pool. Is that because race makes people less able to do jobs, or is it because we live in a racist society that has limited people’s access to the kinds of education that make them able to do these very high profile, powerful jobs?
We’ve got to start telling the story correctly, and we’ve got to get rid of the idea that more meritorious is less diverse, and that more diverse is less meritorious. Neither thing is true, and if you believe they are true, what you are saying is that having more Black and brown people for you signals that you have a lower quality.
They think that the more white an applicant pool is, the more meritorious it is, and that the more diverse it is, the less quality it has.
Many people deeply believe this. They may feel embarrassed that they believe it, but they do, and the salve and the solution for that is to recognize that we are never talking about capacity or ability, we are always talking about opportunity. What the Supreme Court said in this new affirmative action decision was that the government has no obligation to provide people access to opportunity, even when the government has a clearly documented history of robbing them of access to opportunity as a matter of official policy.
Slowing down the revolution
The last thing I want to say is in line with the TED Talk I gave in 2016 called “The Racial Politics of Time,” about slowing down the clock.
One of my arguments in that talk, and in the subsequent book I am writing, is that white people have been made to feel, in a white supremacist universe, like they get to control the flow and thrust of social progress. So when we’re making too much progress too quickly, it’s almost as if they push a button and say, “Let’s just slow things down, let’s just roll back rights. We don’t want women and birthing people to be able to control their bodies. We’re tired of that, so we’ll just reverse course. We don’t want all this racial progress and diversity we’re seeing so we’ll just reverse on that. We don’t want criminal justice reform, so we will just reverse course on a set of fundamental rights that folks have access to.”
For such people, it’s all about being able to control the clock and ensure that progress in matters of social justice happens at a pace that makes white folks comfortable. They believe that the moment they feel uncomfortable, everything should slow down to accommodate their needs, which is to say everything needs to slow down so that white supremacy can continue to march along unchecked. That is the point.
It’s all about being able to control the clock and ensure that progress in matters of social justice happens at a pace that makes white folks comfortable.
How do I know that’s the point? Because I have watched folks softball Supreme Court Justice John Roberts this week because he led the court in making a series of right decisions about voter suppression in states like North Carolina and Alabama. They stopped these Republican-controlled state legislatures from outright gerrymandering districts and suppressing and diluting the power of the Black vote.
But here’s the thing: Roberts is the villain in the story, so he cannot then turn around and be the hero.
Roberts spearheaded rolling back the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and then, having slowed it down, put us in a position where we’re still in nail-biter elections — not because the country is actually so red but because Republican-controlled state legislatures have for the last decade been allowed, unchecked, to roll back provisions of the Voting Rights Act designed to protect Black folks’ right to vote by making sure they don’t have to submit to any federal pre-clearance processes. Now Roberts emerges as the moderate, mild-mannered, reasonable person on the court who’s the hero who protected voting rights.
I’m not buying it. John Roberts is not the hero. He set up this set of conditions, and now that he is concerned about what this might mean for how the country looks, all of a sudden he wants to protect voting rights.
It’s the same argument for affirmative action. In the 1990s, we had a series of court cases and propositions in conservative places that went after affirmative action. We’ve already seen how this story goes.
We already know the harms that happen when you roll back affirmative action protections.
This infamous dude named Ward Connerly was a big proponent of something called Proposition 209 in California, which was designed to roll back affirmative action there in the mid-90s. And then we had a case out of Texas, the Hopwood case, that rolled back race-based admissions there. The result of Prop 209 and the Hopwood case was a precipitous decline in diverse enrollments, particularly of Black students in the UC system in California, and in law schools in Texas and throughout the country.
We already know the harms that happen when you roll back affirmative action protections, yet now we act like we don’t know — in the same way that Roberts in 2013 acted like he didn’t understand the historical context that led to the need for the Voting Rights Act and its enforcement provisions.
They’ve struck down affirmative action to slow down the racial progress that Black and brown folks have been making in this country, and in another decade, when we’re in a fascist, white supremacist Jim Crow-looking [horror] show, someone who has helped create these conditions will emerge to be the hero.
Because, in the end, they can’t actually stop the social justice revolution we are bringing. That’s the good news.
But they can slow down the clock of that revolution and decimate communities and generations and peoples along the way.
In the end, they can’t actually stop the social justice revolution we are bringing.
That’s what’s happened today. That’s why we’re so sad. That’s why we’re so outraged. This is decades and centuries of organizing and resistance that, with the swipe of a pen, these white folks have said they don’t want us to have. Power and privilege give people the ability to take centuries of struggle, and all the bloodshed that went along with it, and literally stop it with the stroke of a pen.
I’m not ending on a good note, other than to say I still believe that we will win. But part of the way we win is that we have to tell the truth. It felt important to tell the truth today.
I hope that you’re keeping your head up. I know that we’ll live to keep fighting. The fights never stop, so there will always be time and space to show up to the revolution. Take good care of yourselves. Keep on fighting the power.
Brittney Cooper, who wrote Eloquent Rage, is a Black feminist thought leader and a professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana at Rutgers University. She is a member of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT faculty union. This post was adapted from an Instagram reel Cooper posted on June 29, the day the affirmative action decision was announced.
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