Supreme Court’s Anti-Affirmative Action Ruling Now Has Colleges Ditching Race-Based Scholarships

Source: Orlando Sentinel / Getty

L et’s say two children are sitting in a room playing with their toys. The first child has a toy box that is overflowing and spilling toys onto the floor while the second child has only one toy. He had more, once, but they were stolen a long time ago. At some point an adult walks into the room and gives the second child a few extra hand-me-down toys and the child is delighted. But the first child did not receive hand-me-downs. He had the same toys, fresh out of the box. Even still, that he was handed nothing and the other child was handed something, the first child throws a complete temper tantrum, even breaking some of the second child’s used toys. When the adult comes back in the room, the first child screeches at them: “Hey, how come he gets those toys and I don’t?!”

White people are that first child whenever they ask why there isn’t a White History Month , a White Entertainment Television network or white colleges, and they’re also that first child when they fight to end diversity initiatives, including college admissions and scholarships for the second child.

The Anti Civil and Human Rights Movement in Education

According to the Washington Post , the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in college admissions effectively caused colleges and universities across the country to also cancel scholarships made for students of color, despite the fact that the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t require it (yet). Duke University, the Post further reported, recently discontinued a 45-year-old scholarship that covered tuition, currently about $66,000 a year, and housing costs of some Black undergraduate students.

The University of Iowa has changed the selection criteria for its Advantage Iowa Award, which dispenses more than $9 million a year in financial help to first-year students from historically underrepresented groups. White students, who previously weren’t eligible, can now apply.

Across the four-campus University of Missouri system, officials are changing the eligibility rules for $17.2 million in institutional and donor-funded scholarships earmarked for students from certain racial or ethnic groups. Race will no longer be considered in scholarship applications.

In the year since the Supreme Court ruled colleges could no longer consider an applicant’s race as a factor in admissions, a growing number of schools have also applied the principles underlying the ruling to financial aid. Nearly 50 colleges and universities, mostly public institutions, have paused, ended or reconfigured hundreds of race-conscious scholarships worth millions of dollars to comply with the ruling, according to a Washington Post tally. The awards identified are worth at least $45 million, but probably amount to much more, The Post found.

Source: Win McNamee / Getty

Ever since the Supreme Court decided to pretend white people didn’t benefit from what was essentially pro-white affirmative action for at least the 400 years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was signed, crybaby Caucasian conservatives have been trying to apply the ruling to everything. They have used the momentum from the ruling to challenge private grants Black women offered to other Black women . They have cited the decision in challenging reparations initiatives in California and other states . They have even protested a business fair that focused on Black-owned businesses, which, as we previously reported , “are statistically less prevalent, less rich in resources, and ultimately less successful than white-owned businesses, which made up the greatest share of classifiable firms (85%) and their revenue (93%) in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center .”

What White Conservatives Refuse to Acknowledge: White People Got a 400-year Head Start in the U.S.

Even if one were to argue that we are currently living in a post-racial America —which we demonstrably are not —one would have to admit that for the roughly two and a half centuries that Black people suffered intergenerational bondage and forced servitude, and the century-plus that we were legally restricted to second-class citizenship, we did not have the same access to the “American dream” that white people praise America for providing along with “liberty and justice for all.” And if you think it’s simply a huge coincidence that the race of people who stay on the losing end of virtually all racial disparities just so happen to be the same race of people who suffered that history, it’s because you’re racist, not because you believe in merit.

The arguments white conservatives are making aren’t about fairness or equality, they’re about the white and fragile denial of systemic racism, and the narrative only serves to enhance white privilege at the expense of Black people and people of color.

More from the Post:

Higher education experts worry that if colleges and universities continue to walk away from race-conscious scholarships, it could have a more profound impact on diversity in higher education than ending affirmative action in admissions. While most selective schools have used race-conscious admissions policies to achieve diversity, far more colleges and universities rely on offering students of color financial help.

Cost is a key barrier for many of these students, financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz said. Yet federal data shows that Black and Hispanic students are less likely to receive college scholarships than White students, he said.

The impact of the court’s decision is ‘multi-fold,’ said C.J. Powell, director of advocacy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Federal Pell Grants, which have helped millions of low-to-moderate income students attend college, have not kept up with the rising cost of tuition and merit-based aid tends to benefit wealthy and White students, Powell said.

There are going to be fewer avenues for students of color to reliably afford higher education if the trend continues,” he said.

White supremacy continues to win because white people — that first child —continue to cry over their delusional feelings of receiving less while sitting on that mountain of toys. It’s pathetic, and also very American.

SEE MORE:

Clarence Thomas Suggests Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Decision Was Wrong

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