So, let’s just get this merrily out of the way:
So the other Supremes handed down a couple of rather important rulings this past week.
First, the court ruled that Asian-Americans are not white and, second, the court said you can’t force people to say something they don’t want to say even if you pay them.
To expand upon that, the court held that racial preferences in any form are not terribly legal and that whole “content of their character” - or grades in the college admissions process – is something people should be judged upon rather than the color of their skin.
Who da thunk it? Oh yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. thunk it – years ago.
Proponents had argued that such practices were merely righting past wrongs or, more importantly from a legal standpoint, current wrongs because of the inequity in educational opportunities afforded to minority students. In other words, how can you expect a kid to qualify for Harvard if their high school sucked?
Opponents have long held that it is incumbent upon the individual to give themselves a better chance and that dropping one kid of one color and replacing them with another kid of a different color is not awfully fair.
Exactly how this reverberate though academia is unclear, though I have a feeling it will go something like this – here’s Berkeley dean noted nutjob Erwin Chemerinsky (you’ve seen that name before) telling students that despite the existing California law he uses race-based hiring quotas and will deny doing so if ever deposed in court about it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12253931/White-Berkeley-Law-dean-tells-class-illegally-discriminates-hiring-boost-diversity.html .
The huddles going one between DEI, HR, admissions, and staff at every school across the country right now must be intense, rife with avoidance schemes, and involving many triggers…actually, law students are already being triggered just by knowledge of, um, the law: https://www.foxnews.com/us/boston-university-law-students-offered-therapy-response-recent-supreme-court-decisions .
As to the free speech case, it involved speech (obviously) and any claims that Denny’s will re-brand itself as Sambo’s (that really used to the name of a similar national diner-ish chain) and only letting white people in the building are beyond flat wrong.
The case specifically involved speech – not access or anything else – and if a person – any person – could compel another person to say something they do not believe. In this case, it involved a Christian web designer being sued for not agreeing to create a website to spread the LGBTQIA2S+ message.
If they came into her restaurant, she could not refuse to serve them. If she had a “do it yourself” web design program she sold, she could not refuse to sell it to them – the case only involved compelling another person to say (web design falls under that as a “creative” service) something they didn’t want to say.
While it definitely sends a signal, it may not have such sweeping consequences as some may think, though it would be interesting to see a case brought by someone forced to go through equity bootcamp at work. Being able to keep your job if and only if you say the right thing seems like compelled speech to me.
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