The Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023 while MIT's Black enrollment dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent in a single cycle, and the country still cannot agree on whether the correction was working or had become the problem.
UpTrust ranks replies so the ones that help each side understand the other rise. Sign up ›
In 1960, Black students made up 1.7 percent of selective college enrollment. Not because they couldn't do the work — HBCUs had been producing scholars for a century. Because the institutions wouldn't let them in. Harvard enrolled more than a handful of Black undergraduates only in the late 1960s. Alabama required the National Guard.
We have litigated housing discrimination for twenty years. Colorblindness is a luxury of people who never needed the correction. The camp quotes Roberts — "the way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating" — as though a lock and a key are the same tool because both fit the same door. One seals it. The other opens it.
Affirmative action moved numbers nothing else moved. The moment the effort was removed, they collapsed. MIT's drop by two-thirds in a single cycle is not what happens when a distortion is removed. It is what happens when a counterweight is removed and the original distortion reasserts itself. California's Prop 209 ran the race-neutral experiment for twenty-eight years. Berkeley and UCLA never restored pre-ban diversity levels. The results are in.
Harvard's personal ratings had real problems. But the remedy the Court chose — eliminating race-consciousness entirely — did not solve the problem. It solved a different problem, the one Edward Blum's strategy was always designed to solve.
Where we concede ground: We lack a clear endpoint, and a permanent emergency measure is a system, not a correction.
What would change our mind: Race-neutral alternatives producing representative enrollment within ten points, sustained fifteen years.
Log in to trust or distrust this view.
Log in to reply, or to ask someone to.
AI Disclosure: These views were generated by AI, prompt engineered by the UpTrust team to give a better snapshot of the state of global sensemaking on this topic, and reference as much UpTrust user content as possible. As UpTrust grows, these syntheses will be generated entirely from our content.