The Wrong Question: Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College
Consider the “diversity” of the current Supreme Court of the United States:
Justice Alito-- J.D. Yale
Justice Coney Barret-- J.D. Notre Dame
Justice Brown Jackson-- J.D. Harvard
Justice Gorsuch-- J.D. Harvard
Justice Kavanaugh-- J.D. Yale
Justice Kagan-- J.D. Harvard
C.Justice Roberts-- J.D. Harvard
Justice Sotomayor-- J.D. Yale
Justice Thomas-- J.D. Yale
Notwithstanding their age, race, gender, religion, state of origin, or the wealth of their parents-- these nine people have more in common with each other than they do with the vast majority of American citizens. The trait that binds these nine people is their membership in the American ruling class, also known as the “Power Elite.”
Harvard Law School was founded in 1817. Yale Law School was founded in 1824— both well prior to the American Civil War when human slavery was a “legal” institution. Notre Dame Law School was founded in 1869 a few years after the end of the Civil War. The infamous Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, that upheld the doctrine of Separate-but-Equal, was decided in 1896. The author of the majority opinion in Plessy was Henry Billings Brown. He attended both Yale and Harvard Law Schools. He wrote,
The object of the [Fourteenth] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 544 (1896) overruled by Brown v. Bd. of Ed. of Topeka, Shawnee Cnty., Kan., 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954).
The lone dissenter from the Plessy majority was John Marshall Harlan. Do you know where he went to law school? Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Justice Harlan somehow--without the imprimatur of the Ivy League-- had the prescience to write,
In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.
Id. at 559 (Harlan, J. dissenting).
Why would anybody want to go to Harvard or Yale? Why would any person want their personal success to be tethered to the reputation of institutions that are built on a foundation of elitism, classism, racism, oppression, and hypocrisy?
Our society celebrates when black people receive admission to elite academic institutions. Our society celebrates when black people are chosen for prestigious high-ranking positions in elite corporations and nonprofits. Our society celebrates when black people win elections or receive appointments to elite and prestigious government positions. But why?
What does an elite academic degree, an elite corporate career, or an elite government position signify? Why does our society celebrate the people who achieve these things? Are the chosen few more deserving than everybody else? Are they smarter, harder-working, more self-disciplined, more creative, more interesting? Do they have a better sense of humor? Are they taller, thinner, or more attractive? Are they just simply further to the right on the bell curve of life? More curiously, why do the rest of us celebrate the people who achieve these things while at the same time lamenting the people who live in generational poverty? Have not both groups proven that the capitalist system works exactly as it is supposed to? The existence of the Bourgeoisie— the ruling class— necessarily implies the existence of a servant class— the Proletariat. The Bourgeoisie is literally defined by its relationship to the Proletariat, and vice versa.
In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote,
the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won; and that it is also the only class for which the development of the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of society.
This is really a profound observation that is even more applicable today then when Guy Debord wrote it in the 1960s. The hundreds of pages of opinions filed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Students for Fair Admission, Inc. V. President and Fellows of Harvard College, June 29, 2023, is a paean to the complete triumph of the Bourgeoisie. According to Debord,
The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.
Students for Fair Admission represents the ruling class's internal dialectic into its most important question: Who gets to be a member of the ruling class? Perhaps more imporantly, which members of the ruling class get to decide how it perpetuates itself? Debord referred to this as the “integrated spectacle.” The struggle is no longer between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat, but “internal to the Bourgeoisie itself.” Students for Fair Admission is a monument to the Power Elite.
The criteria for access to the ruling class has changed over time, from generation to generation. This is simply a truism of dialectical materialism. For example, on September 8, 2023, the NY Times published an article titled, "DEI Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses." According to the article,
At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75 percent of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements
[. . .]
Candidates who made the first cut were repeatedly asked about diversity in later rounds. “At every stage,” the study noted, “candidates were evaluated on their commitments to D.E.I.”
D.E.I statements have become so important for admission to elite universities that
[a] cottage industry has sprouted nationally and in California to guide applicants in writing these statements. Some U.C. campuses post online reading lists of antiracist books and examples of successful diversity statements with names redacted.
This reminds me of the work of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, who wrote fake academic papers using the language and style of the academic left. They were able to get several of their papers published in peer reviewed journals before the fraud was discovered. One published paper titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle” “simply scattered up-to-date jargon into passages lifted from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’.”
Of course it goes without saying that D.E.I. statements are not the problem. They're not even a symptom of the problem. The "problem" is not even really a "problem" unless you think human civilization should operate in some kind of fundamentally different way than it has always operated. The Power Elite does not care about “diversity,” at least not in the sense that it has been commodified, packaged and sold by the Spectacle for consumption by the masses. D.E.I. statements are simply the lastest tool that the Power Elite use to distinguish US from THEM. According to Debord,
Knowledge of the ‘passwords’ and ‘signs’ of the ‘elite’ are promoted by the spectacle as the means of admittance to the inner circles of (managerial) government and its networks of patronage and power.
The use of the “correct” academic language as manifested in acceptable D.E.I. statements and repackaged Hitler as feminist theory has replaced the social register and the blue blood clubs and fraternities of generations past as the “passwords” and “signs” of the Power Elite. So, the real question is not whether the Power Elite should permit itself to use race as a litmus test for determining who gets to be in the next generation. The real question is why do we, the proletariat, the servant class, care how the Bourgeoisie, the ruling class, perpetuates itself. You might be thinking to yourself, well, finally people "who look like me" have access to the ruling class. But, this is simply the next stage of historical materialism and end-stage western capitalism. Societies are not stagnant, and neither is the ruling class. They evolve over time or they die.