If the far right has anything to say about it, Thursday’s Supreme Court decision abolishing affirmative action in college admissions will be the beginning of a slippery slope. And when it comes to this Supreme Court, packed by Donald Trump and bought and paid for by a series of right-wing billionaires, the far right usually does have a lot to say about it.
America First Legal, run by white nationalist former Trump aide Stephen Miller, started teeing up the next racist court decision before this one was even decided. The group has filed at least nine Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, The Washington Post reports, alleging that major companies like McDonald’s, Alaska Airlines, Hershey, Anheuser-Busch, and Nordstrom are “hiring people based solely on immutable characteristics, like race or sex, rather than qualifications or abilities.” If the EEOC doesn’t do what Miller wants, the next step would likely be a lawsuit.
While the Supreme Court’s college admissions decision doesn’t apply directly to corporate hiring and promotion, it “will put the wind in the sails of groups like ours, who want to get the woke, racially based hiring and promotion schemes out of corporate America,” one right-wing pro-discrimination crusader told the Post.
As always, Republicans want us to believe that the only relevant discrimination happens in the moment of hiring or college admission, not in the centuries of oppression and discrimination that shaped people’s opportunities and outcomes leading up to that one moment. The U.S. economy continues to be shaped by the legacies of slavery, segregation, redlining, hiring discrimination, and discriminatory mass incarceration. But when it comes to deciding if someone gets into college or gets a job or promotion, groups like America First Legal have a lot of money and lawyers to argue that none of that can be taken into account, that applicants affected by those histories should be judged by terms that most highly value the type of qualifications accumulated by people whose ancestors were attending elite colleges at a time when those colleges didn’t admit Black people, and accumulating generational wealth at a time when that too was overwhelmingly off limits to Black people through a host of discriminatory practices, many of them written in law.
“The Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, noting also that “the result of today’s decision is that a person’s skin color may play a role in assessing individualized suspicion”—in the context of policing—“but it cannot play a role in assessing that person’s individualized contributions to a diverse learning environment.”
The right-wing legal advocacy complex is laying the groundwork for a Supreme Court case arguing that no matter how white a company’s executives have historically been—where the history could be as recent as a couple years ago—any efforts to change hiring and promotion practices to have more managers and executives of color are illegitimate. Not just illegitimate: unconstitutional racial discrimination. Their argument is that any effort to undo centuries of discrimination against Black people and other people of color is itself discrimination against white people.
And after Thursday’s decision, they have reason to believe this Supreme Court will agree with them.
