Diversity Thursday

Time for a quick revisit to the most important DivThu related Supreme Court case we have seen since we started this series.

We first touched on in 2018, and most recently back in August.  This case has forced everyone to take the mask off concerning what anyone who has served on active duty for the last few decades has known as a truth; the US military actively discriminates based on race and ethnicity.

So, we now have Students for Fair Admission v. President and Fellows of Harvard College & the University of North Carolina. If you need the details of that case, click here. 

We have a 2022 amici curiae for this case as well with Joe Reeder and his law firm again at the front. 

We have this time 35 (33 retired GOFO plus Sen. Kerry and Reeder) signing on vice 36. 

Their Summary of the Argument seven years later from Fisher reads in part;

Prohibiting educational institutions from using modest, race-conscious admissions policies would impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness. Amici respectfully request that, in considering whether to reverse decades of precedent affirming the constitutionality of such admissions policies, the Court will continue to consider how such policies enable the military to serve our Nation’s security interests.

What a gift to truth. Their policies can never survive the light of day. They can try to defend it – but especially as our nation becomes even more mixed-heritage – as the people are WAY ahead of the entrenched sectarians – fewer people are going to see any positive attribute to having government institutions line up with some outdated “one drop” rule, or look the other way to red in tooth and claw racial self-identification fraud for fun and profit.

Regulars here know all the different angles to this topic, but we have new readers every day. So, for them I will offer to click the “Diversity” tab and catch up if they need to. I’ve not deleted a single DivThu for the well over decade and a half it has been running and stand by every word. Enjoy, or not.

Today I want to ponder the institutions that tie the US military in to the goings on at the admissions office at Harvard and UNC … the service academies.

Those GOFO as linked in the August post who signed on to this have no one to blame but themselves, so here we go.

Here is what they – through injecting themselves and the US military in to this fight – are confirming to everyone; despite the sweet little stories we have told for decades, the half-truths, equivocating, and for that matter just blazon lying by our most senior leaders, the service academies including the US Naval Academy – remember that admissions are a zero-sum game here – actively discriminate for an against +/- 18-year old men and women, all of whom were born in the 21st Century, based on self-reported race and ethnicity.

That my friends is as I like to say, red in tooth and claw racism … and you’re paying for it.

In the legal world, discovery is a wonderful thing. 

Over on twitter, Monitoring Bias has a great pull from discovery in this case.

Make no mistake, this data is available from Annapolis, West Point, and the other service academies. It is also available for the Navy writ large in Millington. It was there 20-years ago, I am positive even better data is there today. It is closely held, very closely held, and won’t be provided outside a Congressional inquiry or something like the US courts. It is there, thousands of us have seen it…and it is damning.

How does this operationalize?  The numbers are stark in their results. I’d offer you to review Harvard’s “45%” number … but the numbers are true. Isn’t there something to be said about not living by lies, but by truth – no matter how hard it might be?

People will say, “It is just one factor…” but as reported by Daniel Di Martino, that simply does not wash.

Harvard lawyer defending affirmative action: "Race, for some highly qualified applicants, can be the determining factor just as...being an oboe player." 

C.J. Roberts: "We didn't fight a civil war about oboe players. We did fight a civil war to eliminate racial discrimination."

We all know how this works. It is a glorious thing to finally see this being dragged out into the light.

That won’t stop them from fighting … and gaslighting everyone including SCOTUS.

Toward the end of the oral argument in what has been a controversial Supreme Court case about the legality of affirmative action, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar echoed a key argument of defenders of the inclusive policy: that a diverse officer corps is necessary for national security.

“Our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of the diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer,” Prelogar said.

No, actually, we don’t know that to be true. What does negatively impact “strength and cohesion” is any sniff of favoritism or unfairness. Position and promotion gained simply by being part of an approved – or being denied the same for being part of an unapproved – ethic or racial group will destroy any unit’s effectiveness, and is an insult to those of those same groups who got there on their own merit.

“We have had experiences in the past where the officer corps and its racial composition did not reflect the diversity of enlisted service members,” Prelogar said Monday, in an apparent reference to internal conflict during the Vietnam War, “and it caused tremendous racial tension and strife.” 

Responding to a question from Justice Elena Kagan, Prelogar said that the service academies had considered race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action. According to Prelogar, the academies found that, for now, no such alternatives would lead to an officer corps with adequate diversity.

First, read last week's DivThu, secondly – this is not 1972. These people simply cannot leave the Johnson and Nixon Eras.

There is good and bad here;

“With respect to the military, the United States brief on that is long on assertions that race-neutral alternatives are not available to it and would not work, but not actually long on any evidence of that fact,” he said. “We don’t know precisely what race-neutral alternatives they have looked at. We don’t know what has been tried. We don’t know what else could be available to them.”

Strawbridge suggested that the military could try drawing more officers from the enlisted ranks or from military prep schools.

The oral argument in a similar case, one debating affirmative action at the private Harvard College, was held later on Monday. That case is less directly tied to the service academies than the case pertaining to UNC. Still, it could have implications for colleges and universities with ROTC programs.

Prelogar also offered input during the Harvard argument, briefly reiterating her stance on officer corps diversity.

The good here is that once again we have an open acknowledgement that the US military actively discriminates on the basis of race and ethnicity – so throw that back in a GOFO’s face when they throw up a smoke screen – but the bad here is that there appears to be an opening for a carve out for US service academies.

If that happens, Congress could fix that, or we could have another case in a few years. We’ll see. On balance though, this is all great.

Let’s leave this DivThu on a note of optimism;

…Chief Justice John Roberts, has shown no sign of squishiness in race cases. He was after all in dissent in the Court’s last affirmative-action case, Fisher v. UT-Austin II (2016), and in a 2007 school busing case famously wrote, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

You can never go wrong promoting a race-neutral meritocracy, to desire all people to be seen as individuals worthy of the respect to be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.