I don’t really have any original thoughts on the decision by the Supreme Court to end affirmative actions at America’s most elite colleges, other than to say that this isn’t really a surprise ruling, and I’m not all too worried about it being struck down. Both Freddie DeBoer and Matt Yglesias articulate rationales that I general agree with. First, here is Freddie:

• This framing enrages people, but this is very much a first-world problem: elite colleges are a tiny part of the overall college landscape, by number of institutions and especially by number of students; a majority of Americans still don’t have a college degree; the students of color who get into elite colleges are a tiny sliver of the overall population of people of color and are not remotely representative of that population.
• I am much, much more worried for the vast number of Black people who don’t even apply to college than I am about a theoretical Black student who would get into Harvard with a racial preference but wouldn’t without. The former is in worse shape by absolutely any metric. This whole conversation rests on weird priorities.

Freddie DeBoer

And Matt:

I think professors at top universities face a conceptual problem in that they want to affirm values like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” but the whole point of top universities is to be elitist, hierarchical, and exclusionary. I’m not 100 percent sure what to tell people in this situation. But if you want to be equitable and inclusive, go teach in a community college or a public high school. If you want to cultivate excellence among a social elite, then own up to that as a mission in life. I don’t think there’s one right thing to do, but it’s deeply confusing to try to do both of them simultaneously.

Matt Yglesias

My take is basically this: my priority as a leftist (as I’ve stated before) is around economics and class-based issues, and spending time and energy and political capital worrying about the admissions practices of America’s most elite colleges and the miniscule number of people who attend them is pretty pointless. Like Freddie says, if you are worried (as I am) about the generational, systemic poverty in African American communities, then there are a lot better things to worry about (and, again, to use our precious political capital to defend) then affirmative action. It’s a program that only ever benefitted a vanishingly small number of minorities and did so in a way that probably was more damaging to racial equity efforts than beneficial, in terms of narratives and the oxygen it sucked away from real policies aimed at alleviating systematic racism and discrimination in America. Goodbye and good riddance.