Opinion: By Ignoring Race, We Are Ignoring the Truth

We are deeply dismayed by the United States Supreme Court’s decision last Thursday (July 29th) to strike down race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities across the country. In the decision, the conservative supermajority of the court invalidated admission programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. When Justice Clarence Thomas, in concurring with the decision, said that it was the "race-based discrimination against Asian Americans” that “compell[ed]" him to speak from the bench, he pitted one minority against another to further the conservatives’ agenda, obscuring the reality that it is not affirmative action that has kept Asians out of the Ivy League but the white-dominated system of privilege and preference.
 
The white supremacist ideology at work here is further revealed by the Court’s refusal to follow the logic of its own decision and ban race-conscious admissions to military academies, a caveat that may be extended to police academies. Military violence abroad and police violence at home will still bear the multicolored faces that serve to justify American repression of resistance against white and Western domination. We want you colored races to crush dissent alongside us, the decision says, but we do not want you to lead and govern alongside us.

Although race-conscious college admission programs are imperfect, they are still our best means to rectify historical and current injustices. According to college admission administrators, schools have tried various ways of raising the number of Black and Latino students without consideration of race, such as by accounting for economic status or by guaranteeing admission for students in the top 5% or 10% of their high-school class. However, none of these ways worked as well as the consideration of race in admissions. To truly diversify a campus, race must be considered as one of the factors.
 
In dissenting from the majority opinion, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson made the crucial point that American society is far from ready to abandon race-conscious legislation that addresses centuries of institutionalized discrimination against Black people. "Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal,” said Justice Sotomayor in her address. The University of North Carolina, one of the defendants in the case, admitted Black undergraduates only in 1955, and after the federal courts ordered it to do so. Imposing the "rule of colorblindness" is an attempt to end the conversation on race and justice. To be able to ignore race is the privilege of a truly equal society. Until we achieve that, we are hiding the truth of the matter from ourselves.
 
Editorial Board, Singapore Unbound

Singapore Unbound is a NYC-based literary organization dedicated to the advancement of freedom of expression and equal rights for all through cultural exchange and activism.