Dworkin
Dworkin wrote: But the Supreme Court has ruled over many decades that classifications according to race are inherently "suspect" and must therefore be subject to a "strict" scrutiny that imposes the following three tests. Race-sensitive admissions plans must serve some "compelling" goal, universities must not be able to pursue that goal adequately without them, and they must be "narrowly tailored" to achieving that
Thanks, Blatham, for bringing us back to the text of the article.
I have been rereading Dworkin, and see clearly that he fully acknowledges the strength of Fishin's main argument based on the idea that past SC decisions have ruled in several cases that race is at the least suspect as a criteria for distinguishing between groups. It strikes me that some of these decisions were justified in the sense that the court was striking down uses of AA that were efforts at compensation of present persons for past wrongs or were purely political. However, the current thrust is away from those ideas and looks forward to an improved society. This is not just some Liberal dream, but a virtual necessity if our country is going to compete effectively in an increasingly complex world. We cannot afford to be weighted down with large and publicly expensive uneducated minorities; nor can we afford the resulting civil strife that will continue to accompany that situation.
AA is a simple and uncomplicated way of reaching that goal. It must be seen as satisfying, in this case, the three criteria, quoted above, delineated by the SC.
Dworkin wrote:Of course it is deplorable that America is still plagued by racial inequality so many decades after it committed itself to ending it. It would compound our failure, however, to forbid what so many of our academic, economic, and political leaders, after a quarter-century of reflective experience, think is our best weapon against that inequality. Colorblindness that has no basis in moral principle and helps only to perpetuate racial stratification is worse than pointless.
If the present court strikes down AA as used by the UofM to improve our society in necessary ways, I think it possible that this court will be seen in future times as essentially racist, and that it will set the tone, however elevated in its language, intellectual sophistication, and legal niceties, for the reestablishment of a raciest society.