What distinguishes the Harvard suit from past legal challenges to affirmative action is that it shows that the people the policy harms aren’t privileged and unsympathetic white kids. Nor is this a matter of second-tier white students duking it out for the last available slots against standout minorities. Will that be equally true of those who, thanks to affirmative action, did get in? Perhaps the deepest damage affirmative action does is to those it embraces, not those it rejects. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” John Roberts once wrote.

Source: New York Times October 20, 2018 01:18 UTC