Thursday the US Supreme Court declared illegal l’affirmative action, that is, the set of social policies to combat discrimination adopted some time ago in many prestigious American universities, both public and private, which favor the admission of non-white students. Based on the decision of the Supreme Court, no US university will be able to have quotas reserved for people of non-white ethnicity (in nine states of the country it was already prohibited by local laws).
It is a very significant decision on a measure that for half a century has allowed thousands of African American students to study in the most prestigious American universities, assuming that the lower results of their admission tests are due to less advantageous starting contexts than those of white students. Until now the Supreme Court had upheld the laws on theaffirmative action, always contested by Republicans who deny the presence of systemic racism in US society. With the appointment of three conservative judges by President Donald Trump, however, the balance of the Court had gradually changed, as demonstrated for example by the elimination of the right to abortion at the national level, decided by the Court in 2022.
Supreme Court justices resumed hearing the issue in October following two lawsuits brought against Harvard and North Carolina universities by a group of conservative students (Students for Fair Admissions) who had accused the two universities of favoring the admission of black and Hispanic students to the detriment of whites and Asians.
L’affirmative action it was introduced in the 1960s by the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as a measure with a “compensatory” function. The reasoning was that forcing universities to reserve a certain number of places for students of ethnic minorities, mainly African Americans, would have made it possible to compensate through positive discrimination for centuries of negative discrimination related to slavery and racism. And it would have prevented the reproduction and amplification of the social imbalances produced by that history of segregation and oppression.
That such a decision could come was a hypothesis judged to be realistic for some time: today out of 9 judges of the Supreme Court, 6 are of conservative orientation.
Some of the conservative judges in the past had repeatedly criticized theaffirmative action, arguing that despite good intentions such measures inevitably end up rewarding some minorities and harming others. Who disputes theaffirmative action argues that the goal of protecting diversity in class composition can be achieved without necessarily having to take into account ethnic origin, and that distinctions such as those at the basis ofaffirmative action are meant to be temporary and not permanent.