Former Vice President Mike Pence bizarrely pointed to his own white family of college graduates while praising the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to end affirmative action across most institutions of higher education.
Colleges and universities across the country have had affirmative action policies in place for decades in order to promote more racially diverse student bodies.
Advertisement
Speaking from Ukraine on Thursday, the 2024 Republican presidential contender told MSNBC’s Dasha Burns that he was “grateful to see the conservative majority that we helped build on the Supreme Court of the United States bring an end to most of affirmative action.”
“There may have been a time 50 years ago when we needed to affirmatively take steps to correct long-term racial bias in institutions of higher education,” Pence added. “But I can tell you, as the father of three college graduates, those days are long over.”
“And I’m grateful today that the Supreme Court took us one step back to that America that will judge every man and woman on the content of their character and on their own achievement, and leave race out of consideration of admissions to higher education,” Pence said.
Advertisement
Proponents of affirmative action largely envision a future when such corrective policies are no longer needed. But critics of the Supreme Court decision — including the high court’s liberal justices — firmly argue that time has not yet come and that Thursday’s decision will only serve to hinder progress toward racial equality in the United States. The president of the American Medical Association, for example, said the decision “undermines the health of our nation” by making it more difficult to raise the numbers of nonwhite medical students; nonwhite medical professionals have been shown to help alleviate health care inequities among marginalized groups.
The Supreme Court’s opinions left open the possibility of implementing affirmative action in military academy admissions. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued in a footnote that military schools likely have “potentially distinct interests” from most others, a point Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called “particularly awkward.”
