BY JENNIFER RUTH
My colleague on various AAUP committees, Dr. Derryn Moten, emailed me and others today on the occasion of the ruling. His words offer perspective that someone like John Roberts is incapable of contributing and I asked if I could share the email on the blog.
He begins with a quote from the majority decision written by Chief Justice Roberts:
The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
Dr. Moten then says:
When I arrived at Alabama State University in 1996, the school was under a federal court decree as part of a class action desegregation lawsuit filed by graduates of Alabama A&M and Alabama State University–United States & Knight v. Alabama 828 F.2d 1532 (1987). The plaintiffs argued that the State of Alabama discriminated against the state’s two public Black universities in favor of the state’s two public white universities; namely, the University of Alabama and Auburn University. Federal District Court Judge Harold Murphy ordered both Black campuses to create a Minority Scholarship Program since the Court argued that A&M and ASU histories as HBCUs acted as a disincentive to minority students, read white students. The Court ignored Jim Crow as a reason minority students did not apply for admission to A&M and ASU.
The application for ASU’s Minority Scholarship had FOR WHITE STUDENTS ONLY printed on its cover.
Today’s SCOTUS ruling assumes that race is biologically determined and known. One ASU student asked for a Minority Scholarship application only to be told she didn’t understand the scholarship was for white students. Her mother is white and her father is Black. She received the scholarship even though her whiteness ‘was not discernible in her’ a la Plessy v. Ferguson.
Chief Justice Roberts and the other conservative justices on the Court are dishonest. Black or Brown students are rarely treated in America ‘based on his or her experience as an individual and not based on the basis of race.’ As Rev. Jesse Jackson famously said, ‘In order to be colorblind in America, one has to be blind.’
No minority student at ASU ever complained about the unfairness of the Minority Scholarship. It provided tuition, room and board, books, and fees. The Minority Scholarship was AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. The Court order for the scholarship ended in 2016.
Audre Lorde said it best, ‘The master’s tools will never destroy the master’s toolbox.’
Dr. Moten received his BA in English from Howard University, an MS in library and information science from Catholic University of America, and an MA and PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. His dissertation “A Gruesome Warning to Black Girls: The August 16, 2012 Execution of Virginia Christian” examines the racial tumult over the last juvenile female to be executed in the United States. Moten is co-president of the AFT Faculty-Staff Alliance at Alabama State University, Local 4866, AFL-CIO, and co-chair of the AFT Higher Education Policy and Planning Council, PPC. He is also a southern region vice president for the Alabama AFL-CIO. Dr. Moten worked to bring out of obscurity Crusader Without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., the first biography of the civil rights leader. Moten wrote the forward to the 60th edition republished in 2018.
Read the AAUP’s statement on the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.
The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The numbers are clear and stark. Blackness, brownness, non-whiteness, non-Jewishness, and finally, non- South or East Asianness provide a not imaginary boost to applicants to selective colleges, military academies, and hiring in academia. A Korean-American student’s 1500, is a white student’s 1400, a Hispanic student’s 1200, and a black students 1000. SAT. That is a violation of our constitution. The fact that college applications show an epidemic of white students claiming Hispanic or American Indian identities should be proof enough.
I saw it in my own family. My children are white in appearance. However, their mother is Mexican American through her mother, great-grandparents and beyond. When my son got 1240 on his PSAT I had put down Hispanic in the race category. He was invited by U. of Chicago, Dartmouth, and others to visit the campus at their expense. Tall, blonde and blue-eyed like his Irish, German, and Danish ancestors, he refused to use his mom’s ethnicity. When he earned a 1450 SAT as a “white” student he was not admitted to Penn or Cornell and Rutgers – where he graduated- admitted him without a penny is financial aid other than loans offered.
This was a virtual test of the system. One can only conclude that whiteness is a disability in selective college admissions. Apparently, it is even worse for Asians- who can hardly be blamed for slavery or Jim Crow. The only regimes that have matched our current concerns with racial identity were the antebellum Southerners, the Nazis, and the South African apartheid government. Not very elevated company.
Comparing affirmative action to Nazi or apartheid practice is disgusting and demonstrates both historical illiteracy and a total lack of proportion. The fact that your son did not get into the Ivy of his choice (for whatever reason) does not equate to the killing of Jews or the establishment of bantustans. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Dr. Moten asserts that, “Chief Justice Roberts and the other conservative justices on the Court are dishonest.”
To support this claim, Dr. Moten takes a quote from Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion and distorts its meaning so that he can rebut it using a classic straw man fallacy.
Here is what Roberts actually wrote: “The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”
Dr. Moten takes this quote and twists it into something Roberts did not write. Notably, Roberts did not write – as Dr. Moten implies – that students are presently being treated as individuals on the basis of experience and not race.
Using his false (straw man) interpretation of Roberts’ quote, Dr. Moten rebuts it by writing that, “Black or Brown students are rarely treated in America ‘based on his or her experience as an individual and not based on the basis of race.”
The problem with Dr. Moten’s argument here is that Roberts’ quote does not say what Dr. Moten implies nor does it contradict Dr. Moten’s observation. Rather, the quote narrowly speaks to what should be; not what presently exists.
Correctly, Roberts’ brief dictum merely noted what our Constitution demands, what the law is, and what we as a society should aspire to.
There is no dishonesty here.