Powerline 1/12/2023
Race discrimination has been widespread in America ever since affirmative action became entrenched in the early 1970s. Now, the Supreme Court may finally be poised to bring it to an end, at least in some contexts.
Much as litigation was needed to bring an earlier iteration of race discrimination to an end, lawsuits will be necessary to stop institutions from continuing discriminatory practices to which they are deeply attached. Our friend Mark Perry has probably done more of this work than anyone, but he is not alone. In Texas, a white man who was unable to gain admission to medical school has started a race and sex discrimination class action against a number of public medical schools and related defendants. The case is Stewart v. Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and the complaint is embedded below. I think it is a good piece of work. It relies independently on the Fourteenth Amendment and on federal statutes, including 42 U.S.C. §2000d (Title VI), 20 U.S.C. §1681 (Title IX), and 42 U.S.C. §1983.
Currently, race and sex discrimination are legal in the context of university admissions. But if the Supreme Court holds race discrimination to be illegal in the pending Harvard and University of North Carolina cases, as many expect, the plaintiff in this Texas case clearly has the goods on the medical schools, on the facts.
More: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/01/suing-to-stop-race-discrimination.php
This is a much bigger case that it seems at first blush. The schools are using the argument that achieving "diversity" is a compelling state interest that justifies race-based preferences. And they're also trying to argue -- at the same time -- that they're not
really using racial preferences anyway, just some subjective criteria that "happen" to have that impact.
If the schools lose, the short term impact will be in college education because those are the parties, but it will end up with a
massive ripple effect into employment, primary and secondary schools, etc., and likely end up gutting a lot of the DEI programs. Essentially, "content of their character, not color of their skin" will become Constitutional law, and it will be buttressed by law prohibiting affirmative action "by disguise" as well.
It would be a
huge blow to organized leftism.
