Although Affirmative Action has become extremely limited in public universities, and the program has benefited White women more than any other group, the Trump administration wants to restrict how it benefits non-White students even further.
A document obtained by The New York Times reveals that the Justice Department, helmed by noted racist Jeff Sessions, is seeking lawyers to investigate and possibly litigate “intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
Because there is no “intentional” racial discrimination explicitly in favor of White applicants, the only conclusion that can be drawn from the document is that the program is targeting affirmative action programs that benefit people of color.
News of the policy shift was a Twitter trending topic early Wednesday morning, with other elected officials and civil rights advocates chiming in on the social media platform.
Senator Kamala Harris, a longstanding proponent of affirmative action, stated, among a series of tweets, that “Jeff Sessions’ attack on #Affirmative Action is yet another attempt by this Administration to roll back progress and divide us. Make no mistake, diversity in education makes everyone smarter. It’s a strength not a weakness.”
The Congressional Black Caucus also criticized Sessions, tweeting that he “wants to put more people of color in jail and take away their educational opportunities.”
Notably, the new project only targets race and not affirmative action programs that are based on gender, despite fewer people benefiting from race-based admissions.
When women were targeted under civil rights laws that made sex a protected class in the 1960s, their numbers in higher education, government contracts, and employment grew as well.
Yet, White women have been among the primary detractors of the program, including Abigail Fisher, who lost her Supreme Court battle to fight the race-based affirmative action practices at University of Texas at Austin.
A cognitive dissonance continues to persist among job and college applicants like Fisher who believe in the need for programs to address discrimination against women, but who fail to consider that victims of persistent racial discrimination also deserve recourse.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Department did not respond to the Times’ requests for comment.