Fundamental Fairness and the Supreme Court's Harvard/UNC Case

Reading about the affirmative action arguments in the Supreme Court’s Harvard/UNC case this week, I recalled that recently I had the occasion to organize a “podcast” for a group of high school students who are currently or soon will be applying to college. The participants were all first-generation immigrants – from the Philippines, the Ukraine, Liberia and Canada; that is, one Asian, two whites, and one black. I know all of them quite well, and really like all of them. 

But the situation raises an interesting question – under the current affirmative action regime, the black student would inevitably get preferential treatment by colleges for admission, while the white and Asian students would inevitably be discriminated against. That system of preferences and discriminations would be applied to them, even though the black student never experienced legal discrimination in America (Jim Crow laws) and none of his family were slaves in America; and even though the whites and Asians could not possibly have been perpetrators of any historical discrimination, because neither they nor their families were here in America. 

How can that possibly be fair? Except on the crudest and least persuasive grounds – “all black people are victims”/”all white people are oppressors” – what even would be the argument in favor of such a regime? 

The reality, of course, is that affirmative action is no longer a “liberal” remedy… it’s the worst kind of “conservative” turf protection, where a vast administrative apparatus in universities and corporate H.R. departments looks for rationales for continuing the status quo. The Supreme Court can and should end this un-American and very foolish exercise in social engineering.