The Ugly Black Bitch - Joy Reid

Joy Reid, the MSNBC host, said in response to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling that racial preferences were the only reason black people like her had access to elite schools such as Harvard. Eddie Glaude, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, said affirmative action was “the only remedy to the legacy of discrimination in admissions in American higher education” and “they’ve taken it away.” Another black academic, Jelani Cobb, wrote in The New Yorker that affirmative action “helped expand the Black middle class” and predicted that one result of the decision will be “fewer students from traditionally underrepresented minorities on college campuses.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the case is chock-full of similar doomsaying. The nation’s first black female Supreme Court justice presents a lengthy chronicle of racial disparities in outcomes and argues that they can be linked directly to slavery and the legacy of segregation. Ending racial preferences, she writes, ignores “the well-documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality’ that still plagues our citizenry” and “will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race.”

Nowhere do these critics explain why Asian college applicants, who were the plaintiffs in the case and whose ancestors were responsible for neither U.S. slavery nor its Jim Crow aftermath, should be treated worse than other groups in the present because of what whites did to blacks in the past. Nor can proponents of affirmative action explain why racial discrimination is wrong when directed at blacks but apparently fine when non-blacks are on the receiving end. Are Jackson and other advocates of racial double standards seeking justice—or revenge?

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas chides Jackson for building her argument on racial determinism. She uses “broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” writes Thomas. “Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”