Conservatives Mean a Very Specific Thing When They Complain About “Fairness”
The only demographic breakdowns that conservatives will accept as legitimate are those that track their priors about what the world should look like.
Last week in this newsletter, I wrote about the demographic diversity of the first class of students to apply to and enroll in college since the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in 2023, which is—at least, adjusted for expectations—not a complete and total disaster. Although underrepresented minority enrollment fell at some schools, it held steady or even increased a bit at others, thanks largely to schools’ efforts to mitigate the impact of a case that its champions expected and intended to make top schools even whiter than they already were.
At the same time, I wrote that the conservative legal movement would not allow these results to stand for long. Activists like Ed Blum, whose organization, Students For Fair Admissions, brought the affirmative action challenges to the Court, are already finding new and exciting ways to expand their war on multiracial democracy. The fact that there are, despite Blum and company’s strenuous efforts, still a decent number of Black people at elite universities just means that those universities are going to get dragged back to court sooner rather than later.
As it turns out, I grossly underestimated Blum’s patience. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Students For Fair Admissions has fired off litigation hold letters to Princeton, Yale, and Duke, arguing that under the Supreme Court’s new standards, those schools’ declines in Asian American enrollment could be explained only by flagrantly illegal discrimination. “Based on S.F.F.A.’s extensive experience, your racial numbers are not possible under true neutrality,” say the letters, which Blum signed. “You are now on notice. Preserve all potentially relevant documents and communications.”
Again, given that Blum needs to fight revanchist culture wars like normal people need to breathe oxygen, this development is not especially surprising. But the language of the letters lays barer than ever the lie that Students For Fair Admissions baked right into its name: The only demographic breakdowns that conservative activists will ever accept as legitimate are those that reflect what conservative activists believe to be the natural and correct order of things. As the civil rights lawyer Oren Sellstrom put it to the Times, “It is deeply ironic that Mr. Blum now wants admissions numbers to move in lockstep.”
This all-hands-on-deck response to an unexpectedly modest drop in Black and Hispanic enrollment demonstrates that they do not and never did give a shit about whether a process is “neutral” or “fair,” in any meaningful sense of the words. They only care about getting a process that yields the outcomes they want.
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