Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – No sooner had we begun to reconcile the one-year anniversary of the end of Roe v. Wade than the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action — a major route to education for the only people in this country legally prohibited from learning to read and write during the quarter millennium of enslavement, followed by nearly a century of intentionally inferior schools during Jim Crow.
Both rulings uphold the centuries-old caste system by (1) all but ensuring a higher birth rate at a time of a decreasing population among White Americans and (2) making it harder for marginalized Black and Latino Americans to improve their lot through a college education.
This decision on affirmative action reinforces a major pillar of caste — the presumed roles and occupations considered preordained by the original racial hierarchy: It specifically prohibits affirmative action in college admissions, except at institutions that prepare citizens for the military, reinforcing the long history of Black people seen as fit to be soldiers rather scholars and surgeons.
As Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, “The Court has come to rest on the bottom-line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom (a particularly awkward place to land, in light of the history the majority opts to ignore).”
The ruling further magnifies racial caste divisions by distinctly targeting race rather than gender or other attributes, while remaining silent on, and thus preserving, affirmative action for white women, whom multiple studies have shown have been the prime beneficiaries, in part due to their numbers and their proximity to those in power.
This decision tragically feeds into the destructive perception of manufactured scarcity that pits groups against one another and which a caste system depends upon to survive, hurting all of us in society as a whole.
#caste #castetheoriginsofourdiscontents #affirmativeaction #supremecourt | Posted on 03/Jul/2023 00:34:20
