DEI IS JUST LIPSTICK ON A PIG

April 8, 2024

DEI- Diversity, equity and inclusion are the themes we see from the woke Dems and corporate America demanding that we hire less qualified minorities to balance out the inequalities of the past. That sounds just like the arguments made by those who supported affirmative action over the last 50 years. And that’s because DEI is nothing more than affirmative action rebranded. And the reason they came up with DEI is because the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last year in 2023 in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC. 

The universities were sued by Asian students who were passed over for far less qualified minorities under their affirmative action programs. The Asian students sued the universities for violating their 14th Amendment since the universities accept federal money.

Now we see all the Lib universities, like UNLV, have created offices of DEI. But it’s the same old racist policies that the Supreme Court so eloquently ended.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended the use of affirmative action in college admission. By a vote of 6-3, the justices ruled that the admissions programs used by the University of North Carolina and Harvard College violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars racial discrimination by government entities.

Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:

In the Harvard admissions process, “race is a determinative tip for” a significant percentage “of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants.” 

In the wake of the Civil War, Congress proposed and the States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, providing that no State shall “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” Amdt. 14, §1. To its proponents, the Equal
Protection Clause represented a “foundation[al] principle”—“the absolute equality of all citizens of the United States politically and civilly before their own laws.”

By 1950, the inevitable truth of the Fourteenth Amendment had thus begun to reemerge: Separate cannot be equal. The culmination of this approach came finally in Brown v. Board of Education. In that seminal decision, we overturned Plessy for good and set firmly on the path of invalidating all de jure racial discrimination by the States and Federal Government

“[T]he historical fact [is] that the central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate racial discrimination.”)

Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality”—it is “universal in [its] application.”

Twenty years later, no end is in sight. “Harvard’s view about when [race-based admissions will end] doesn’t have a date on it.”

First, the interests they view as compelling cannot be subjected to meaningful judicial review. Harvard identifies the following educational benefits that it is pursuing: (1) “training future leaders in the public and private sectors”; (2) preparing graduates to “adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society”; (3) “better educating its students through diversity”; and (4) “producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks.

’ this Court has rejected the assumption that ‘members of the same racial group—regardless of their age, education, economic status, or the community in which they live—think alike

Yet by accepting race-based admissions programs in which some students may obtain preferences on the basis of race alone, respondents’ programs tolerate the very thing that Grutter foreswore: stereotyping. The point of respondents’ admissions programs is that there is an inherent benefit in race qua race—in race for race’s sake. Respondents admit as much.

“One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.”

Harvard concedes that its race-based admissions program has no end point.  And it acknowledges that the way it thinks about the use of race in its admissions process “is the same now as it was” nearly 50 years ago.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the Roberts opinion.