In June of 2023 the Supreme Court determined that affirmative action -- a practice that had been common in some colleges and universities since the 1960s -- was a violation of the Equal Protections clause of the 14th Amendment. So what, exactly, are these schools not allowed to do anymore? What does it have to do with race and diversity? How was it supposed to work... and did it?
Margaret M. Chin, professor of sociology at Hunter College, is our guide to this week's episode.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:02] In 1963, President John F Kennedy went on television and said something out loud, albeit in the language of his era that ostensibly most Americans already knew.
John F. Kennedy: [00:00:15] It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be [00:00:30] treated as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:36] That Black Americans were not given access to the institutions that allowed others to achieve a certain kind of success. And he backed it up with stats.
John F. Kennedy: [00:00:46] The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the state in which he is born, has about one half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place [00:01:00] on the same day, one third as much chance of completing college, one third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed about one seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year. A life expectancy, which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:26] Pretty glaring, powerful stats, right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:29] Really though, [00:01:30] they probably didn't come as a shock to most people. Black Americans are discriminated against. This results in inequity in many spheres of life.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:39] And JFK was saying that America needs to take steps to address that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:43] Yeah. Like not passively allowing people of color into those spheres because it wasn't going to work like that. In 1961, Kennedy signed an executive order to reinforce this when it came to employment on the part of federal contractors. He ordered them to [00:02:00] take, quote, affirmative action to ensure that people were, quote, hired and treated during employment without regard to their race.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:08] So in 1961, Kennedy is giving speeches that make it explicitly clear that action needs to be taken to change the face of employment and mobility in America. Is this the first time that we hear those words, affirmative action?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:22] Actually, no. Affirmative action, at least as used in federal policy, first cropped up in the National [00:02:30] Labor Relations Act in 1935. And back then, it had nothing to do with race.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:37] Wait, is this the act that lets employees form unions?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:41] That's the one. And dictates how that's going to work. And by the way, some of those unions ended up doing a ton of work for civil rights in America, but many of them were segregationist, racist, and sometimes had explicit policies that ensured whites only hiring standards. Funnily enough, affirmative action [00:03:00] was initially the term for correcting unfair labor practices, just not the unfair labor practice of refusing to hire people of color.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:08] But then Kennedy made it very much about that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:11] Very much. And I'm not going to bury the lede here. We are talking about affirmative action, in part because in June 2023, the Supreme Court banned it nearly entirely in higher education institutions. And we will get to that. But to get there, we need to understand [00:03:30] why we had affirmative action to begin with. This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:35] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:36] And this is Margaret Chin, professor of sociology at Hunter College.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:03:41] What I believe the federal government was intending to do was for affirmative action to do more than just, you know, bar or stop racial discrimination. Rather, it was supposed to create an affirmative action to kind of level the playing field, you know, by addressing the effects of hundreds of years [00:04:00] of systemic racial discrimination and oppression in the United States.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:10] This is something that President Lyndon Johnson affirmed just a few years later in 1965. Here he is giving the commencement address at Howard University's 1965 graduation.
Lyndon Johnson: [00:04:20] You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bringing [00:04:30] up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus, it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And [00:05:00] this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:07] All right. So the idea here is you can't just say here are all the privileges of American life. We won't actively keep you from them. Now because of centuries of abuse, enslavement, discrimination and barriers to entry. And also, we should mention here, Hannah, LBJ was racist. Lots of civil rights policy and lots of racist personal conduct. [00:05:30]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:30] Yeah. LBJ was a civil rights leader and LBJ was a racist. Complicated man. So President Johnson took Kennedy's affirmative action policy one step further with executive order 11246. It prohibited federal contractors from discrimination in hiring when it came to race, color, religion or national origin. In 1967, they added sex to that list. In 2014, they added sexual orientation and gender identity.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:58] Okay. And Margaret is saying that [00:06:00] affirmative action was not simply an anti-discrimination policy. It was corrective, like it was about acknowledging that the United States was an oppressive place for millions of people.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:10] Yeah, And this is important because the Supreme Court is going to change that corrective part of it down the line.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:17] Before we go any further, Hannah, can you just sort of explain to me what affirmative action actually means? Like practically speaking?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:25] Okay. The idea here is essentially that admitting someone [00:06:30] to a job or later on an educational institution should not be colorblind, as in should not ignore the color of their skin and how that may have affected what they have had access to or been denied in life compared to, say, the white man with the glittering resume reflective of what he has had access to and not been denied. Affirmative action hiring policies were specifically designed to encourage the hiring of people of color. And [00:07:00] at first, Black Americans were a primary focus.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:07:04] When you look at the civil rights movement, including, you know, what happened after civil war and in the Jim Crow laws, you saw the atrocities, right, against the African-American community. So that was really a topmost mind for everybody to address those communities initially.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:23] And JFK mentioned those stats. Those were undisputed truths about what life was like to Black Americans at that time. [00:07:30] Less access to education, employment, health care. Et cetera. So before official affirmative action policy, what did most companies even look like?
Margaret M. Chin: [00:07:41] So before affirmative action, most of these private companies, as well as government employment agencies, companies, had very few, in fact, almost zero people of color of employment. I mean, if you think about everything was [00:08:00] segregated. So that meant that any company basically had very few or zero people of color in any of these organizations. These laws and these policies and ideas didn't come about until the civil rights movement. So only after that and the implementation of affirmative action policies do you begin to see slowly an increase of the numbers of people of color in all of these organizations?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:28] And while it was only federally funded [00:08:30] contractors and subcontractors who were actually mandated to do this by executive order, by 1966, companies with more than 100 employees were required to submit annual reports on how many people of color and women they currently had employed. Affirmative action was in the air. There was an understanding, and not just at the federal level, that these policies were important.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:08:56] If we look at the United States, we know [00:09:00] that social mobility is really important. A lot of us still think college or having a decent job. Up is incredibly important for social mobility. We still see race mattering in terms of health and wealth education statistics today in 2023. But if a person, because of any of these programs, if they get to go to a better college, they get a better job, which means a higher income, [00:09:30] which doesn't just support their own family, but in many cases, if they are the first to go to college, it supports not just their children but their siblings family as well. Sometimes it buys them health insurance to support their children, which means better health outcomes. And so as it is, we know of communities, of people who have a difficult time moving out of better living conditions [00:10:00] without access to these things. So it makes a huge difference.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:06] At some point in this, affirmative action was something that other companies were doing as well, like companies that had nothing to do with the federal government and schools.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:15] That's right. An affirmative action in schools, specifically universities and colleges, which again, is mostly banned at this point. It meaningfully started in the late 1960s.
Nick Capodice: [00:10:27] And this is something they did on their own. The government [00:10:30] didn't mandate this.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:31] Nope. This was something that higher education institutions tended to feel like they had the responsibility to do, which had a lot to do with the fact that there was also a ton of social pressure in the form of protests, often right on campus, to join the fight for multiracial democracy. Colleges and universities decided to create their own affirmative action policies. And by the way, it worked. Admissions of Black students doubled in a single year, [00:11:00] according to data from places like Columbia and Harvard universities.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:04] But can you just give me an example of what affirmative action actually means in practice? Like, what is the action?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:11] This is a great question. When the federal government mandated that federal contractors take affirmative action, it didn't actually say what that action was. It was just like, take it, take action that results in diversity. And so when colleges and universities implemented their own racial [00:11:30] diversity, affirmative action policies, a lot of them set quotas.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:35] Racial quotas.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:36] Racial quotas. Yeah. So like we will reserve X number of seats for Black Americans, X number of seats for Asian Americans. Et cetera. Economically and or educationally disadvantaged might be a part of that, too. The Supreme Court got rid of the quota thing with a case called Regents of the University of California v Bakke. That was in 1978. [00:12:00] Alan Bakke was a white man who applied to UC Davis Medical School and did not get in.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:12:05] And I guess in their medical school system, they actually used some kind of a quota to look at the number of students getting into their medical school. So Bakke pushed back saying that, Hey, I didn't get in because there's a quota allowing Black students to get in. And it's therefore reverse discrimination against me. So the ruling in the Supreme Court at that time [00:12:30] was that race based admissions was still allowed, but you can't use quotas.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:36] UC Davis said, We are doing this to rectify past discrimination in medical school admissions. Correct. Current discrimination, increase the number of doctors and underserved communities and quote, promote the education benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body.
Nick Capodice: [00:12:52] And the Supreme Court said, well, not using quotas, you're not, but you can still factor race into admissions if you want.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:58] Really importantly, the [00:13:00] deciding vote was from Justice Lewis Powell, who said, okay, go ahead and keep race as a consideration, but you cannot set quotas. And by the way, and this is Powell speaking, I'm rejecting both your rectifying past discrimination argument and the argument for increasing providers and underserved communities.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:19] So which part of the argument did he agree with?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:22] He found a compelling interest, meaning a factor that often lets a law or policy pass muster in the Supreme Court in the diverse student [00:13:30] body argument.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:13:31] What they basically said was that, you know, diversity in terms of an educational benefit, diversity, the use of race or ethnicity in an educational setting was still very valid and still very, very important. So that was the first ruling that basically said we don't look back. We don't look back at all at systemic discrimination. But we want to do is look forward and to look at how diversity now will help [00:14:00] our students and help our communities and help our employment be effective for whatever they do. It increases creativity, it increases overall better learning and working environment.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:11] So starting in the 70s, addressing the ills of the past was no longer grounds for affirmative action. And so present day affirmative action, I mean, until it was banned by the court, couldn't use quotas and it couldn't justify itself with what is basically the reason JFK and LBJ established it to [00:14:30] begin with.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:30] Yeah. Instead, it became a part of what any of the colleges or universities that used affirmative action probably would have called an holistic process. They look at grades, test scores, whether you're an outstanding flutist, how many volunteer opportunities you engaged in, how effervescent you are as a person. That is a real thing. Whether you started a successful company at the age of 12, your artistic prowess, whether your dad and your dad's dad and [00:15:00] your dad's dad's dad went there because, by the way, affirmative action for wealth and connection very much remains a thing. And race because of diversity and only because of diversity. If you are abiding by the court. But as of 2023, not anymore.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:16] So affirmative action is, I should say, was about diversity and simply that. And the court at one point agreed using race as a factor was an acceptable way to ensure racial diversity on campus. But [00:15:30] then the court decided that is no longer acceptable. So, Hannah, do you have any idea, like what happens when you can't use race as an admissions factor anymore?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:38] I kind of do. And we'll get to that after the break.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:45] But before that break, just a reminder that Civics 101 is a listener supported show. If you like what we do, if you like our mission, if you like us, consider making a donation in whatever amount fits your budget. You can do that at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:25] We're [00:16:00] back. You're listening to Civics 101. We are talking about affirmative action, [00:16:30] a hiring policy that was mandated by and for the federal government and then adopted by plenty of other companies and institutions, notably colleges and universities across the country in the 1960s. Also a policy that has been recently banned in higher education by the Supreme Court. And right before the break, Hannah, I was asking you, do we know what happens when you're not allowed to consider race and admissions anymore? And you said we kind of do?
Margaret M. Chin: [00:16:56] I think it was over probably 20 years ago when [00:17:00] they banned affirmative action in California.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:02] This is Margaret Chin again, professor of sociology at Hunter College. And it was nearly 30 years ago that Californians voted to end affirmative action in state and public institutions.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:17:14] And what they found was they still haven't been able to bring back the exact numbers of Black and Latino students to the level that it was. So they spent billions of dollars figuring out all kinds of different ways of admitting [00:17:30] students to try to give equal opportunity to the Black students and Latino students, especially at the top tier U.S. schools. They found that at the community colleges, they were able to do that, but not at UC Berkeley, not at UCLA. And they thought that was still of utmost importance to do that. So they're still trying to do it. And so that's a real experiment. I think many of us knew that this could happen at [00:18:00] the elite schools as well once you ban a race as a factor.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:04] So a couple of things to note here. When affirmative action was banned in California, population diversity at top tier schools plummeted. And a study found that along with this admissions drop, students of color in California became less likely than white students to go to grad school to earn high salaries, even to graduate college at all. And these schools did try other race neutral tactics [00:18:30] to ensure diversity, but they have not been as successful as affirmative action in increasing population diversity.
Nick Capodice: [00:18:38] So California voted it out. And of course, now it's been banned by the highest court in the land. So, Hannah, how does the American public actually feel about affirmative action? Is there some pretty strong opposition?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:52] Yeah, there is. A Pew Research poll found that half of Americans were opposed to taking race and ethnicity into [00:19:00] account in admissions at highly selective schools. White and Asian respondents were significantly more likely to lean opposed than Black and Hispanic, and Republicans were more likely than Democrats to lean opposed. But the court has looked at affirmative action repeatedly over the years and repeatedly affirmed it, albeit in close rulings. Still, in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor gave us a sense of what was coming.
Sandra Day O'Connor: [00:19:27] It has been 25 years since Justice [00:19:30] Powell first suggested approval of the use of race to further an interest in student body diversity. In the context of higher education, we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interests that we approve today. Justice Ginsburg has filed a concurring opinion.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:53] And so 20 years ago, Justice O'Connor was like, All right, just for now, we'll keep this going. But this isn't going [00:20:00] to last forever, you know, 25 years and it'll all be over.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:03] And her prediction came to fruition early.
Nick Capodice: [00:20:06] Yeah, but her prediction is based on, if I'm understanding correctly, the United States no longer needing affirmative action.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:13] Yeah. She says that the court agrees that the state in 2003 has a compelling interest to assemble a diverse student body on campus, and that race conscious admissions helped to do that. But the goal of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, according to O'Connor, [00:20:30] is to do away entirely with governmentally imposed discrimination based on race. And then she said this.
Sandra Day O'Connor: [00:20:38] Accordingly, Race conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. Enshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences would offend this fundamental equal protection principle. We so we see no reason to exempt race conscious admissions programs from the requirement that all [00:21:00] governmental uses of race must have a logical endpoint. We take the law school at its word that it would like nothing better.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:08] So did the Supreme Court in 2023 decide that affirmative action had reached its logical endpoint?
Margaret M. Chin: [00:21:14] The latest case versus Harvard and SFA versus UNC. They were supposed to decide whether there was discrimination against Asian Americans and white students, whether both of the schools [00:21:30] violated the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:34] Wait, hold on. That's what they were supposed to decide. This was a case about discrimination against Asian American students.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:43] Yeah, that's how they started out.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:45] So is that what they decided, that Asian Americans were discriminated against?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:50] Well.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:21:56] Judge Roberts said that both programs lacked [00:22:00] and this is his quotes lacked sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner and involve race, stereotyping and lack meaningful endpoints. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:19] So the majority decided that using race and admissions is unwarranted and in fact results in stereotyping and negative impacts. Is that what happened [00:22:30] to Asian American students?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:31] I'll tell you this. In his opinion, Justice Roberts cited the lower court findings in the case.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:38] As in district and circuit courts, that the case passed through before getting to the Supreme Court.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:43] Exactly. And the First Circuit and district courts found no evidence that race conscious admissions harm any racial group. The lower court said affirmative action could stay.
Nick Capodice: [00:22:55] But the Supreme Court said it had to go.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:58] It did.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:00] So [00:23:00] some of the same stats that the lower courts cited as not being evidence of discrimination against Asian Americans. Roberts seemed to see as evidence of race being used against someone in admissions. And by the way, I did ask Margaret about this. Was there evidence of discrimination against Asian-American students? And she looked into this extensively. I will post her article to our website. But to grossly oversimplify, her answer was no, and [00:23:30] not just no, but that the instigator of this case, a white businessman named Edward Blum, who has long worked against affirmative action and minority voting rights, cites stereotypes and discrimination that, while very real in the Asian American community, are not actually present in Harvard's admissions process, and that regardless, the original lawsuit was seeking relief for Asian American students, and the highest court did not directly [00:24:00] address that in its opinion.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:24:12] A lot of Asian Americans have asked me, so where does this leave us? In this case, we seem to be the face of this case. And I said, yeah, you were the face of this case, except that people didn't address relief for Asian Americans. We all know that, especially after Covid, with the anti-Asian violence, [00:24:30] that there is discrimination. We know that Asian Americans aren't moving up in the corporate ladder as well as they could be. You know, I did studies on that, but that wasn't addressed. And one way to really address it is to look at affirmative action programs as the way they were before June 29th. You know, Asian American students have been doing well under affirmative action at Harvard. They are now up to almost 30% of the [00:25:00] admitted class, and they've been increasing ever since affirmative action was established when I was there, basically. So I think those are two things that need to be addressed and, you know, and to actually see that there are plenty of Asian Americans who actually do support affirmative action as of before June 29th.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:23] So Hannah if this case brought on the part of Asian-American plaintiffs, was not ultimately decided for [00:25:30] or directly on the basis of the claim of those plaintiffs, what was the justification of Roberts's decision?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:37] It's important to note that Roberts makes his way to a 14th Amendment equal protection violation by starting with the statutes pertaining to Asian Americans. He went on to cite with Justice O'Connor, said in 2003 that affirmative action should be unnecessary by 2028. Roberts says the Harvard and UNC affirmative action policies lack [00:26:00] a logical end date. He also spends quite a while referencing what Justice Powell said in 1978 that past societal discrimination should not be a factor here, and policies based on it fly in the face of the dream of equality. And very tellingly, I think Roberts says that a benefit provided to some applicants should not be at the expense of others. In other words, he believes that affirmative [00:26:30] action hurts.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:32] So I just have to ask Hannah, who does it help when we eliminate affirmative action? Seems like the sort of Pollyanna idea would be, you know, everyone. But it doesn't sound like that's where we're heading.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:26:50] With regards to these latest cases. Both cases in the lower courts show that if you eliminate it, race conscious admissions [00:27:00] as it existed before June 29th. Right. You would actually decrease the number of Black and Latino students on these campuses. Asian Americans would fall in between. They would increase just a little bit, which makes sense because Asian Americans are a tremendously diverse group. They have some of the people with the highest incomes and some of the very lowest. They have the biggest income gap of any racial group in the United States. [00:27:30] But white students would do the the best. They would gain more spots. That's what the economists in the cases both argued.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:39] You know, it's interesting that Margaret says this, because I know that according to the episode you did on the 14th Amendment, the vast majority of people who won 14th Amendment claims citing equal protection in the past 50 years or so, have been white people. And it kind of sounds like white people will gain the most from this change.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:58] It does sound like [00:28:00] that. And to the dissenters in this case, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson The question of whether we need to continue to find ways to explicitly benefit minority groups and access to higher education is not actually a question at all. Sotomayor and Jackson both argue in their dissents that the United States is still segregated, that race is still a determining factor in access to so much and that affirmative action helps [00:28:30] to correct decades of racist segregationist action, especially on the part of elite universities.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:28:39] Judge Sotomayor and Kagan and Jackson, they basically said this is her quote Today, This court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits. In so holding the court cements a superficial rule [00:29:00] of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:12] To which, of course, Justice Roberts replies, quote, Justice Powell, who provided the fifth vote and controlling opinion in Bakke, firmly rejected the notion that societal discrimination constituted a compelling interest.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:25] Compelling interest. Again, that legal term of art. That means a reason the court should weigh in on this [00:29:30] in the first place.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:31] Yeah, and that basically the court hasn't operated on the societal discrimination question for decades. And one more thing. There is one case in which Roberts says that race conscious admissions can remain in higher ed one.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:29:47] One of the other carve outs in this particular case that is interesting, which also shows that the court's, of course, does believe that race still matters is that Judge [00:30:00] Roberts also gave a carve out to the military academies. He basically said that the military academies are exempt. He says that no military academy is party to these cases and none of the courts below address the propriety of race based admissions in that context. And this opinion does not address the issue in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:26] Wait, so military academies can continue to use affirmative [00:30:30] action, but not other higher ed institutions?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:33] Yep.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:30:37] Judge Jackson writes back, the court has come to rest on the bottom line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker and not in the boardroom. So that's particularly [00:31:00] horrible to think that people of color could be used as cannon fodder, but not as people who could intellectually contribute in universities and in boardrooms.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:11] So Margaret stressed a few points over the course of our interview and subsequent conversations. Overwhelmingly, one of those points was affirmative action contributed to more minorities in education, especially elite universities. And education contributes to more minorities in the middle and upper classes in [00:31:30] graduate schools and in high level professional roles. Another thing is that wealthy people from every race are more likely to attend elite universities, but wealth alone does not dictate privilege or upward mobility in America. And this is because of decades of societal discrimination, the way Margaret put it in the US. There is always an intersection of race and class, even among the very wealthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:32:05] So [00:32:00] when it comes to making sure that we preserve access for students who may not otherwise have it, or who, even if they do have it, are not statistically as likely to maintain that access. Does Margaret think colleges are going to find another way?
Margaret M. Chin: [00:32:20] I mean, the inevitable outcome is that I think colleges will begin to look at their application process and begin to evaluate how they can maintain the [00:32:30] racial diversity on their campus. You know, given the legal guidelines set up for them under the Supreme Court, and I think most of the colleges mission is still to educate a diverse student body, and that includes racial diversity. So I think most of the colleges are trying to figure out how can they find a diverse student body within these parameters. So I think that's what they're trying to do now. I mean, I think they'll be creative and [00:33:00] try to come up with ways within the legal realm. What's legal given what the Supreme Court says?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:08] Margaret Chin, a child of Chinese immigrant parents, celebrated professor and author of a few books that directly address the question of race and labor, upward mobility and the benefits of diversity. As I said earlier, she is herself a beneficiary of affirmative action and a Harvard alum. So I asked her basically [00:33:30] what she thought of the policy.
Margaret M. Chin: [00:33:33] I definitely recognize that maybe without affirmative action policies, you know, I may not be doing what I'm doing at all. I may not have gotten into Harvard, you know, and I may not have gotten, you know, into my graduate program. I may not have become, you know, a full professor without without it. And I'd say with or without it, you know, we could have been tokens. So but I believe that [00:34:00] that one little push, that one little recognition to see that we do have these things inside of us that can flourish and that can be nurtured. I believe affirmative action has done its job.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:18] I want to say one last thing before we wrap up here, because this doesn't happen often, but Margaret emailed me some thoughts after our interview. So she certainly credits affirmative action with [00:34:30] helping her get to where she is today. But she and frankly, reading both the opinions and the dissents, I would say the justices of the Supreme Court as well agree on a central point. Diversity on college campuses is not just good, it's necessary. Margaret pointed out that because of school and neighborhood segregation in the US, a college campus may just be the best integrated and most racially and socioeconomically diverse place that any kid encounters [00:35:00] up to that point in their life. And if we want to live in a functioning, multiracial democracy, the question of race in college admissions, it matters.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:35:25] OK. That [00:35:30] does it. This episode is produced by me. Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice. Christina Phillips is our senior producer and Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode by SINY, The New Fools, Michael Keeps, Don Vayei, peerless, Herbonics, Katori Walker, Ballpoint, Ryan James Carr and Cushy.Margaret Chinn and her colleagues have done a lot of writing and thinking on this case, affirmative action, diversity, socioeconomic outcomes based on race. I’m going to link to a lot of that work on our website, civics101podcast.org, because it’ll help inform this episode. [00:36:00] Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.