World News

22056 readers

119 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Breaking: Supreme Court Shoots Down Affirmative Action. (www.washingtonpost.com)

submitted 1 year ago by African_Grey@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Affirmative Action has now ended in the United States.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] HairHeel@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From the majority's opinion

nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected the applicant's life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation's constitutional history does not tolerate that choice

Sounds like schools can still look at specific circumstances of a person's life; just can't make a blanket assumption that because they look a certain way they must have had things hard or easy.

If the goal is to provide restitution to people who have been impacted by government policies, evaluating whether or not they were actually affected, and to what extent, seems reasonable to me.

[–] jennifilm@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

The issue here is exactly the issue affirmative action aims to help resolve - if you leave it so universities can if they so choose look at how someone’s experience of race has impacted on them, many of them won’t, because of structural racism and how ingrained it is. This decision is not requiring universities to consider their admission practices and what barriers might be in place - and many won’t.

It’d be great if they did, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need requirements like this because universities and other organisations would proactively consider how their processes and decisions might be creating or removing barriers for all their students. Currently, that isn’t happening.