Who is affirmative actions largest beneficiary

White women, like Fisher, stand as a testament to affirmative action's success. If anything, the dismantling of affirmative action is launched at people of color, but it affects white women, too. And the willingness to erase them from the story is part of the problem. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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White women benefit most from affirmative action — and are among its fiercest opponents. By Victoria M. Share this story Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Share All sharing options Share All sharing options for: White women benefit most from affirmative action — and are among its fiercest opponents. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Jennifer Gratz was one of the first to successfully argue against race in affirmative action. Gender was a blind spot in the original affirmative action policy Sex discrimination protections were not included when affirmative action policy was initially institutionalized in the s.

White women have become some of affirmative action's fiercest opponents In general, women today are more educated and make up more of the workforce than ever before, in part because of affirmative action policies. But does race inherently undermine an admit's qualifications? Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. For more newsletters, check out our newsletters page.

The Latest. Why Biden has disappointed on immigration By German Lopez. Hating work is having a moment By Rani Molla. I can't imagine, for example, an Ivy league college turning down the children of its biggest donors.

I can't imagine a university in need of a good running back rejecting his application in favor of an applicant who's really good in English. And I can't imagine Asian applicants being given equal consideration to their equally talented white counterparts. It's obvious that there are people who get into a college whose numbers aren't as high as those who don't get in. Why does that phenomenon only seem to become so worrisome when it's benefiting black people?

And how come white women, who have benefited so greatly from affirmative action, aren't more vocal supporters of the policy. Consider that a rhetorical question, one that Twain's already answered. Depends on who their competition is. Historically, black students as a group have tended to underperform academically—to get lower grades than their SAT scores predict. So do varsity athletes. As many writers have pointed out, when we are considering colleges and jobs, there is a pipeline problem.

They went to the same high schools that their brothers did and most of them probably got better grades. The success of affirmative action in employment and university admissions has not eliminated the education and income gaps between whites and blacks. Although the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics has dropped some since , it is still more than double the rate for whites.

Americans of color are starting from much farther behind. Millions never get on board a train that most whites were born on.

The Supreme Court case that admissions offices rely on today is Regents of the University of California v.

It was decided in , and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. Bakke is a good example of the jurisprudential confusion around affirmative action: the Court managed to produce six opinions in that case. The plurality opinion, by Lewis Powell, struck down an admissions program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, from which Allan Bakke, a white man, had been twice rejected, but it upheld the right of schools to use race-conscious admissions programs.

The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside. Bakke was able to show that his record was superior to the records of some of the students who had been admitted through the special program. The Davis program was obviously not narrowly tailored.

One consideration that the university offered in the way of compelling state interest was its belief that minority M. Powell found no evidentiary basis for this, and it was arguably a racist assumption. The school could have investigated whether applicants had worked with underserved communities in the past. They did not, and Powell suggested that such a standard might be a better proxy than race.

Admissions programs determined by race are in violation of both the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding. Powell argued, however, that another right was in play: the First Amendment; specifically, the right of academic freedom.

There is no constitutional right of academic freedom, but Powell cited a case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, in which Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, quoted South African jurists to the effect that the principle of academic freedom allows a university to determine who will teach its classes and who will sit in its classrooms.

The Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in , was basically a relitigation of Bakke. As was Fisher v. Texas, in , and the second round of that case, known as Fisher II, in The Fisher cases involved a white woman who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, U. Each time, the Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions, but they were close calls. The vote in Fisher II was 4—3.

Harvard, is the same case one more time. The person behind both Fisher and the Harvard case is Edward Blum, a man who for whatever reason has decided to devote his time to preventing a small number of black and brown teen-agers from attending colleges that are desperate to have them.

Harvard won at the trial level because the judge ruled that its admissions program is consistent with other Supreme Court decisions, such as Bakke. But, given the composition of the Supreme Court, it is all too likely that it will decide that the country has timed out of this particular form of remediation. For remediation is fundamentally what affirmative action is.

But the reason we have affirmative action is that we once had slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and racial covenants, and that we once had all-white police forces and all-white union locals and all-white college campuses and all-white law firms. It was zero. Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people.

The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written. Holder vacating a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has backfired. Supreme Court upheld the admission policies of the University of Texas at Austin, after a white woman, Abigail Fisher, sued the school for rejecting her admissions application.

She claimed that applicants of color who were less qualified but whose racial backgrounds were included in the university's review process took her slot.

After a lengthy court battle, the Supreme Court ruled that UT's admission policies were indeed constitutional — a major win for affirmative action. According to the document in the Times report, the Justice Department's civil rights division is seeking lawyers "interested in working for a new project on investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.

Affirmative action was first introduced by President John F. Kennedy in , and required federally funded institutions to take measures to "ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.