Is it all over for affirmative action? Edward Blum, a 71-year-old conservative legal strategist, has spent decades campaigning against “race-conscious” university admissions policies (also known as positive discrimination) in the United States, which, he has argued, disadvantage high-achieving Asian Americans. And he may finally be on the brink of victory: the US Supreme Court is due to rule on two lawsuits brought by Blum’s organisation, Students for Fair Admission, that could force Harvard and the University of North Carolina to rethink their race-based selection processes.
This week, Blum spoke to me about his fight for legal justice, his enduring faith in colour-blindness, and the importance of family values and “tiger moms” in educational success. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
EB: The United States law today, as interpreted about 20 years ago by the Supreme Court, allows colleges and universities to put a thumb on the scale — that is, to rig an outcome — based upon a student’s race or ethnicity. In the case of Harvard and other elite universities, that thumb on the scale is now diminishing the opportunity of Asian Americans to be admitted, while boosting that of African Americans, Hispanics and whites. This is not only going on at Harvard, but at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and dozens of other competitive colleges.
EB: I do, just as the founders of the modern Civil Rights Movement did. There are, I think, a small minority of Americans who, in good faith, see colour-blindness as a reversion to white supremacy. However, in poll after poll, going back 30 years, Americans celebrate the idea of colour-blindness. They don’t want their race to be used as an element in whether they’re hired or fired, or whether the police pull them over, or whether they’re selected for jury duty. Americans embrace colour-blindness — and it’s not just white Americans, it’s a vast majority of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians.
EB: That’s an incredibly important part of the argument, but there is something else that is deeply troubling about race-based affirmative action. That is, in universities that lower the bar for African Americans and Hispanics, we often see students either dropping out because their academic backgrounds are not sufficient to compete, or switching to less competitive courses. This means that students who hope to become doctors, engineers or computer scientists end up graduating with degrees in the humanities or social sciences, which wouldn’t have happened had they gone to a college where their qualifications were better matched. That’s another important element that I think will change.
EB: That’s exactly right, and there’s data and studies to endorse that. Plus, there’s one other element here. We’ve heard it, and we can read it, and we’ve seen it a million times: minority kids on competitive campuses are told that the only reason that they are there is because they are a certain race, not because they were academically qualified. So those kids who truly were academically qualified feel like: “Because the bar is lowered for all African Americans, even though I scored as well as any Asian on this campus, people think I’m here because I’m black.” That’s a terrible burden, too.
Article URL : https://unherd.com/2023/05/edward-blum-my-battle-against-affirmative-action/