Expert: Michael Troy - 7/4/2003

Question
I don't understand the meaning of the two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on college admissions. Could you give me simple answers to these two questions: Would a negro attempting to gain admission to undergraduate school be happy with the decisions? Would a negro attempting to gain admission to a law school be happy with the decisions? Thank you very much for your response. Al Brown

Answer
Hi Al,

First off, I think most "Negroes" prefer to be called black people or African-Americans these days.

As for your question, I assume you are talking about Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger.  In those decisions, the Court confirmed that schools may give preferences to certain races in order to achieve a "diverse" student body.  The opinion also said that such preferences for another 25 years or so.

This left a lot of people scratching their heads.   For example, Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent said that he agreed that racial preferences would be illegal in 25 years, but failed to understand why they were legal now, and how its constitutionality could simply change over time.

The opinion also seemed deliberately vague.  The Court held that the undergraduate practice of giving 20 extra points to all minority applicants was unconstitutional.  But the court upheld the law school's practice of giving some vague unmeasurable preference to minorities that same to have about the same impact as the undergrad's 20 point preference.

Since most schools are quite eager to continue giving special preferences to minority applicants, they have already announced that preferences will continue and will be added in some places where existing polices were struck down.  School administrators just have to keep the process rather vague and unclear to the outside world as to how they evaluate the "whole person" including race.  As long as they don't reduce it to a mathematical formula, the Court seems to be satisfied.  This applies to any school, graduate or undergraduate.

So, would a black applicant be happy with the decisions?  Well, it seems to me that might be asking if a white person was happy with Jim Crow laws in the early 20th Century South.  Many liked them as they gave special privilege to whites over blacks.  However, many whites despised such laws as being unjust based on race.

As with modern racial preferences, a black applicant to either an undergrad or a law school will most likely get a special preference over and above his fellow white applicants.  As a result, the black applicant may gain admission while more qualified white applicants are rejected.  If a black applicant likes this sort of advantage, then yes, he or she should be happy with the recent decisions.  

However, many blacks oppose such preferences because as Justice Thomas (who is black) pointed out in his dissent, such preferences stigmatize all blacks.  It leads to a common view among many of their peers that they do not deserve to be there and got their only based on their skin color.  As Ward Connerly and others have pointed out, racial preferences also can often get students into a school where they are over their heads and they have a much more difficult time graduating.  So for blacks who think they should be treated just like everyone else, regardless of race, they would be disappointed with the decisions.

I hope this helps!
- Mike