Hispanics are not the hapless victims of the Supreme Court’s decision that the Left needs for its narrative.
Hispanics are not the hapless victims of the Supreme Court’s decision that the Left needs for its narrative.
L ast Thursday, the Supreme Court decisively struck down affirmative-action programs practiced by Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Court declared that affirmative action, which allowed universities to employ race-conscious admissions programs, violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause.
Unsurprisingly, the boo-birds immediately emerged from the woodwork. The Biden administration, left-leaning journalists, and progressive activists alike decried the ruling as a significant step back in the fight against systemic racism and discrimination. The Court’s decision, they say, will homogenize universities and harm efforts to achieve socio-demographic equity in education. Raul Reyes, an attorney who frequently writes for CNN and MSNBC, called the ruling “out of touch,” and argued that “the end of affirmative action will limit the ability of Latinos to access selective colleges and attain economic mobility.”
What a load of baloney.
The complaints addressing Hispanic communities particularly interest me. Though my last name might mislead you, I am Mexican American. My grandmother, who emigrated from Mexico, often drove me to school, and I was named a National Hispanic Merit Scholar in high school. I’ve earned two degrees, and I’m currently working on my third, at the fine state school Texas A&M. Based on these activists’ logic, I should weep because my younger cousins and future children will apparently never have a fair shake at Harvard.
I’m not weeping. Hispanics are perfectly capable of determining their own positions on affirmative action. We are also capable of becoming doctors, lawyers, or researchers without affirmative action.
If affirmative-action advocates want to generate support among Hispanics, they need to stop turning to the bigotry of low expectations. The whining and pontificating should stop because America’s Hispanic communities deserve better than being babied.
My claim that the collective activist complaining amounts to babying is not an exaggeration. Affirmative-action advocates have been preparing for years for the program’s end. More specifically, friendly media outlets and academics have highlighted activist efforts to galvanize support for affirmative action in Hispanic communities. They typically glorify protesters, label Hispanic opponents to affirmative action as racists, and connect Hispanic college attendance to social justice more broadly.
The media is truly of one mind on affirmative action. Many journalists freely cite activists who assert that Hispanic voters “do not know what the goal of [affirmative action] is” and proclaim that its end will “crush” diversity in elite professions.
These arguments are patronizing. The clear implications are that Hispanics are too stupid to know what’s good for us, are incapable of attending college without some form of institutional support, and have to be involved in social-justice activism in order to have worth.
Even if you agree with the idea of affirmative action, the policy accomplishes very little. A landmark 2005 study found that “the elimination of race-based admissions preferences in California and Texas had little or no effect on the decisions of highly qualified minorities to submit their SAT scores (and presumably apply) to the selective institutions in the two states.”
Moreover, the study found little evidence that affirmative action “seduces” minority students towards elite universities. Instead, “the fact that their SAT-sending behavior did not change after the elimination of affirmative action suggests that minority applicants thought they deserved consideration for admission at top schools irrespective of affirmative action.”
In other words, we Hispanic students know our worth. We know that we are capable of attending good universities, and we know that we don’t need government help to attend them. The idea that minorities will never be able to succeed in a merit-based system is pernicious and ridiculous. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that Hispanics are beginning to reject what some have called “progressives’ paternal politics.”
Affirmative action is now illegal throughout most of higher education, but the war goes on, as affirmative-action policies remain in both the private sector and K–12 education. At this rate, progressives should look elsewhere for activism fodder. Sooner or later, Hispanics are going to get sick of the condescension.