Liberal thinkers, many of whom can in good faith cogently defend the concept of affirmative action in 2023, must have been mortified to hear President Joe Biden’s goofy criticism of last week’s Supreme Court ruling that ended the practice of racial discrimination in higher education admissions.
I’m sure more than a few cringed when the president in an interview on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” invoked the Civil War to defend affirmative action. “We fought a war over it in 1860,” the president said.
Well, yes, we did fight a war in the 1860s, Mr. President. It wasn’t over affirmative action per se, however. But, if we go with the president’s thinking for a minute, one can only imagine what college admission policies might look like today had the Confederacy won.
The fight today is over whether affirmative action constitutes a form of racial discrimination. By allowing one class of people special privilege in college admissions it naturally follows that other classes of people will be discriminated against.
And that, the court ruled last week, violated the Constitution. Discrimination – even well meaning discrimination – is wrong in America.
The SCOTUS ruling last week lays it out simply: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
In other words, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Someone needs to get President Biden out of the forefront of this argument. He makes sweeping and incorrect statements about the Civil War and, I would argue, dangerous characterizations about the current court (he calls the court “not normal”). The truth is, these kinds of back-and-forth arguments and decisions are absolutely normal and thank God for that.
The idea of affirmative action in higher education has been in conflict for decades. And, even this ruling, will still allow colleges to make decisions that bring diversity to campuses. It just can’t be based on race.
When Thomas Jefferson was asked about how he wrote the Constitution, he said he was “not striving for originality of principle or sentiment.” Instead, he hoped his words served as an “expression of the American mind.”
He nailed it with prose that still rings in the American minds of thinkers on both the left and right.
For my money, no one person today better embodies that sentiment than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a poor Black man who has risen to heights of the Supreme Court.
What he wrote in support of this decision supersedes all other comments that I’ve read. It ought to be carved in stone in front of every courthouse in America:
“The solution to our nation’s racial problems cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity. Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race. Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors and identities and see each other for what we truly are: individuals with unique thoughts, perspectives, and goals, but with equal dignity and equal rights under the law.”
SPOOKY
Facebook’s new head of election policies is Aaron Berman.
Don’t know Mr. Berman?
Well, he’s a former CIA agent who allegedly quit the “spook” business in 2019 to join Meta to oversee “misinformation” at Facebook. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the person who helped write the rules for what is acceptable content on Facebook is ex-CIA and now is overseeing information about the 2024 election.
Spooky, don’t you think?
ONE MORE THING
– My friend got a degree from UNLV in Egyptology, but can’t find a job. So, she went back to school to get a doctorate to teach Egyptology. It’s literally a pyramid scheme.
Thanks for reading. Until next week, avoid knuckleheads, laugh a little and always question authority.
“Properly Subversive” is commentary written by Sherman R. Frederick, a Nevada Hall of Fame journalist and co-founder of Battle Born Media, a news organization dedicated to the preservation of community newspapers. You can reach him by email at shermfrederick@ gmail. Com.
