Rita Panahi: The left’s reaction to the US affirmative action ruling shows it holds people of colour in contempt

The unseemly reaction to the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action perfectly highlights the bigotry of low expectations the left holds for people of colour.

Affirmative action is a nice terms given to policies that amount to racism. Picture: Getty Images

You’d think the American Left would be thrilled that a genuine example of institutional racism was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States last week.

But instead of celebrating this triumph for equality, the left from President Joe Biden and former first lady Michelle Obama right down to the wacko pundits and academics on MSNBC have launched into an unseemly mass meltdown.

The SCOTUS ruled admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution meaning it’s unlawful for universities to discriminate based on race, colour or national origin.

Sadly, that’s what has been happening at many universities where an applicant’s race can determine whether they’re admitted or rejected.

At Harvard the anti-Asian discrimination was so extreme that elite Asian-American candidates in the top academic decile had a lower chance of being admitted than a black candidate in the seventh highest decile. An Asian student in the seventh decile had virtually no chance of admission (less than 1 per cent).

Affirmative action supporters rally at Harvard University following the Supreme Court decision. Picture: AFP

Affirmative action, or positive discrimination, are nice terms given to policies that amount to racism. And, the biggest victims of this systematic racism are often other minority groups including Indians, Japanese and Chinese students.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the colour of their skin.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, a black justice selected on merit, was even more damning of a policy that uses “diversity” as a cover for racism.

“Universities’ self-proclaimed righteousness does not afford them license to discriminate on the basis of race,” he said.

The same positive discrimination policies are evident at Australian universities but given the relatively small Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population the impact is not as profound.

The reaction to the SCOTUS decision revealed the left’s racist underbelly with many prominent commentators attacking the Asian plaintiffs while others revealed their bigotry of low expectations and belief that blacks and Hispanics could not possibly achieve great things without affirmative action programs.

You see the modern Left have long abandoned equality in favour of that Marxist ideal of equity; they don’t strive for equality of opportunity but instead try to engineer equality of outcome.

But as the great American thinker Thomas Sowell notes: “If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?”