Attacking Affirmative Action is a Threat to Racial Equality

In our second Listening Tour stop, the New America Higher Education team caught up with Dr. Jonathan Feingold, Associate Professor at Boston University School of Law, to chat about the political landscape surrounding the Supreme Court Cases that could ban universities and colleges from considering race in their admission process.

The conversation quickly dives into learning more about Dr. Feingold’s legal scholarship and work, primarily focusing on civil rights and racial justice. Dr. Feingold has contributed to numerous law journals, spoken on various law panels, not to mention created a podcast that discusses the many aspects of this country’s law at the intersection of race and class.

In this interview, Dr. Feingold mentions how these pending cases are no different from previous affirmative action cases, Fisher v. Texas and Grutter v. Bollinger. The only caveat is that the Supreme Court has an entirely different makeup and is more conservative than ever– alluding to the fact that this country is also experiencing a moment in time where harmful discourse and rhetoric are being disseminated to the general public to interfere with the civil rights of many marginalized and minoritized groups. “As we speak, these cases are setting a precedent to attack other forms of civil rights, which we are already seeing with states banning books, attacking DEI efforts in higher education, reproductive rights, voting rights, and so forth.”

Dr. Feingold closes the conversation by noting that if there is a ban, the U.S, Department of Education, the Department of Justice, and the White House can leverage their power and existing resources to protect students of color wanting to achieve postsecondary success, leading to greater economic mobility and closing gaps in racial inequality.

Here are some additional highlights from our Listening Tour Talk with Dr. Feingold:

• “It's important that the White House and the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice, continue to leverage existing federal civil rights laws, including Title VI and Title IX, and remind institutions that they have a legal, not just a moral, but also a legal obligation to create institutional settings in which everyone, regardless of their racial identity, regardless of their gender, can enjoy the full benefits of university membership and to locate DEI efforts.”
• “If you want the best and brightest surgeons, you want the most talented pilots; if you want the top CEOs, you will not get that if you have a system that simply rewards the students that have inherited the most social capital and advantages. And that is where we will be moving if you can't have programs like affirmative action that enable institutions to consider students' different cultural, racial, and socio-economic experiences.”
• “If your goal is to prevent the American public from having just the basic vocabulary and framework to see the world in which they live, then racism will continue to permeate US society in ways that can harm all of us.”

To learn more, check out the entire conversation here.

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