Bluebells ascendant

Steve Schwartzman

Jun 30

A post by Leslie McCroddan in Facebook's Texas Wildflowers group tipped me off to the presence of Texas bluebells (Eustoma russellianum) somewhere along Vista Ridge Blvd. in Austin's adjacent northern suburb of Cedar Park. On June 23rd I drove the length of that road, scanning left and right until finally, just as I was about to run out of road, I spotted the bluebells.

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'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished*

As the past half-century wore on, I increasingly despaired I'd live long enough to see American courts uphold our Constitution's 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The first of those reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, that amendment was meant to guarantee that black citizens were afforded the legal protections as white citizens. Subsequent court decisions extended the amendment from state governments to the federal government. A century later came the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As the U.S. Department of Labor's website explains:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed that act into law, he said:

The purpose of the law is simple. It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. It does not give special treatment to any citizen. It does say the only limit to a man's hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own ability….

That sounded like justice, and most Americans applauded, but within just a few years many American institutions went back to discriminating on the basis of race. The only difference was who got discriminated against. Where the United States had a long history of discriminating against blacks, the new so-called affirmative action programs began discriminating against whites. Euphemisms aside, in a situation with a fixed number of available places, like an incoming college class, you can't "affirm"—i.e. give extra preference to—one person without "disaffirming" a person of similar or even greater qualifications who doesn't get that extra preference. Discrimination is still discrimination, whatever the claimed motivation.

In recent years the discrimination has worked most heavily not against whites but against Asians, whose stellar performance in academic matters over the past few decades has significantly surpassed that of every other ethnic group, even though many of those Asians have been immigrants or the children of immigrants who came to the United States with no money or other advantages and who often didn't even speak any English.

In 2022 the United States Supreme Court heard cases brought by students whom the University of North Carolina and Harvard University had racially discriminated against. Yesterday the Supreme Court issued its decision. By votes of 6–3 and 6–2 (there was one recusal), the justices ruled that institutions of higher education can't discriminate on the basis of race.

Amazingly, I've lived long enough to see it. Nevertheless, the probability that "elite" American universities will adhere to the spirit of yesterday's Supreme Court's ruling is zero. (Compare yesterday's commentary about nullification.) Universities won't flagrantly keep putting racial checkboxes on applications, but they'll find ways—some obvious and others devious—to circumvent the ruling. Increasingly many schools have already been eliminating objective measures of performance, like the SAT and the ACT, so there'll be less evidence of the discrimination that the schools will keep perpetrating.

It's criminal that the people in charge of education keep adamantly refusing to do the one thing that would make so-called affirmative action in colleges unnecessary to approach racial parity in performance: see to it that students in elementary and secondary school—regardless of their home circumstances—get a solid grounding in reading, writing, arithmetic, science, and history. Instead, for all the decades I've been involved in education, the people in charge have kept lowering standards and making excuses for the many students they give diplomas to even when those those students haven't learned much of anything.

* I've taken that line from Shakespeare's famous "To be or not to be" speech from Hamlet and applied it to the end of racial discrimination.