Commentary | After Affirmative Action – By Richard Samuelson (Real Clear Politics) / Feb 15, 2023
The betting odds are that the Supreme Court will soon rule against affirmative action. It is worth asking how we got here, and what we should do about it.
Why is affirmative action in jeopardy? The main reason, ironically, might be the increasing ethnic diversity of the United States. In 1960, the U.S. was roughly 88% white and 12% black. The census category “Hispanic” did not yet exist. Similarly, the U.S. did not have a separate “Asian” category for the less than one million Americans from various nations in Asia, though the 1960 census had separate boxes for some, but not all, Asian countries. Today the U.S. is 61% white and dropping. Among American children, the white/nonwhite population is rapidly approaching 50-50.
This demographic change is making our post-Jim Crow civil rights enforcement scheme unworkable. Passage and enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an effort to end the tyranny of Jim Crow. Technically, the law made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, skin color, religion, sex, and national origin in most public and private domains, such as voter registration, employment, and public accommodations. But the interpretation of the law rapidly transformed from prohibiting categories of action to creating “protected classes” of people, to the point where it essentially pits white men – and now, with the introduction of sexual orientation as a protected class, specifically straight white men – against everyone else. Other than that shrinking group, all others are supposed to be “protected” from discrimination in our DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) regime.
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