The Lone White Man Behind the Supreme Court Anti-Black Attack on Diversity
The country is braced for the imminent Supreme Court decision that is expected to overrule race-conscious admissions in higher education. The rupture in racial progress that this will cause will only begin at the campus gates. This impending opinion will likely upend the watershed decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the most well-known Supreme Court decision of our times that outlawed segregation.
In this forthcoming opinion, the Court is positioned to set us back to the era of Jim Crow and undo the progress that has been made in the name of claiming that the playing field of opportunity is once and for all time equal. Any cursory glance at the gaping chasm that exists between white wealth and Black wealth tells the disparate truth unsparingly. But, as the final word on what is law in US society, the Court will not need to justify their opinion with any data or be subject to review by any governing body that is representative of the millions of people who will be directly impacted by this decision. The Court, now with a firm extreme right-wing majority (three of whom appointed by a former president who has no regard for the rule of law), is going to — in one opinion — put to death what took two generations to achieve.
If former president Donald Trump is best understood as the logical conclusion of anti-democratic white nationalism, then Ed Blum is the personification of their anti-Black schemes realized.
The case before the Supreme Court is not the result of a sweeping tide of student dissent at the respective campuses. It is the work of one lone white man with a grudge. Enter Ed Blum. If former president Donald Trump is best understood as the logical conclusion of anti-democratic white nationalism, then Ed Blum is the personification of their anti-Black schemes realized. A former stockbroker from Maine, he is the self-appointed director of something called The Project on Fair Representation, which promotes the undoing of every and any federal law or practice that in any way seeks to redress the legacies of discrimination against Black people in education, voting, employment, and contracts. The website even boasts a project to stop any government consideration of Black reparations. The home page does not say “Black” explicitly. Instead, the term “racial discrimination” is used as a generic moniker to cloak his white conservative aims. But it is certain that Blum would never take on a Black client who experienced racial discrimination. What his project is actually doing is seeking to return the country to the time when the laws privileged white people at the expense of everybody else. And with this case now before the Court, he might just get his wish.
An entire movement is trivialized when a single white man can scramble together a mockery of claims that get fast-tracked consideration by the highest court in the land.
In the name of purportedly seeking to show that race should not matter in American life, he is showing just the opposite — just how powerful and important race actually is. Nothing in our current moment better reveals the power of white privilege and how it is inextricably linked to the judicial machinery of the law. Despite his argument — that an individual should be considered strictly on the basis of their academic accomplishments — he exemplifies how race is the central defining factor for power and access in this country. Thousands of Black people shed their blood, were killed, lynched, and more than a few were assassinated to achieve mere recognition by the highest court in the land. An entire movement is trivialized when a single white man can scramble together a mockery of claims that get fast-tracked consideration by the highest court in the land.
To understand this case and the motivation behind it is to understand the psychology of Blum and the psychology of the racist right-wing that provides him with the support to commit his life to this campaign. This is not his first case to reach the Supreme Court. Neither is it his first attack on diversity in college admissions. Blum has been at this for quite some time.
After losing a congressional election in Texas to an African American, Blum did what every good white conservative does in such a situation — he blamed liberal Democrats and Black people. He took his white tears and concocted a claim that the electoral map unfairly favored his opponent. And the conservative Supreme Court was just too eager to consider it. In a 5–4 decision that struck down the electoral map as discriminating against whites, Blum took his victory as a sign that he could duplicate these anti-Black gains in other key areas of civil rights and set his sights on college admissions. Overall, Blum has been behind more than two dozen cases over a 25-year period that has effectively neutralized or absolutely gutted the protections in the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Blum’s campaign to deal the death blow to diversity as a viable admissions option for higher education is part of a larger campaign to attack Black progress in American life. Called a lone crusader, he is not acting alone. His one-man organization is funded by DonorTrust, a billion-dollar non-profit that funds conservative and libertarian causes. Its director, Leonard Leo is the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, another conservative operation that practically hand-picked Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. In all of these cases, they use the 14th Amendment against itself. The amendment, enacted by Congress following the Civil War, was intended to provide citizenship rights for Black people and to protect Black people from those Southern states that had just fought to keep them in slavery. It is now being used by white conservatives to undo those very protections and render Black people politically vulnerable to Jim Crow state action.
After experiencing defeat with a white female plaintiff in the Fisher case, he had a eureka moment — “I need Asian plaintiffs.” Playing off a perniciously divisive stereotype of Asian Americans as the model minority, he set up a website complete with a stock photo of a sad-faced Asian-American student, and the potential plaintiff class began to form. Preying on immigrant and first-generation Asian students and their families who likely lack any formidable understanding and appreciation for how their families benefited from these affirmative action policies that were established as the result of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet, the majority of Asian American civic and student organizations are not falling for Blum’s divide-and-conquer shenanigans. Over 100 Asian American student organizations signed on to amicus briefs filed by both the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Asian American Legal Defense Fund against Blum’s Students.
These two cases in question, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, pit Asian Americans against other students of color. With the first case, they claim that Harvard’s policies discriminate against Asian American applicants who would be admitted were it not for supposed “less qualified” African American and Latinx students taking their place. The admissions policies of both schools do not have a set-aside for Black students. Neither do they have a quota system in place. They do what the law provides, which is to consider the racial identity of the applicant as one of a number of considerations. None of those accepted are without academic merit. Despite this, the public perception of affirmative action as giving Black kids an unearned hand-out persists.
You cannot talk about fairness and equality for all while you simultaneously outlaw the teaching of one group’s history and accomplishments toward achieving equality for all and make it unlawful to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of this country.
Given Blum’s assertion, one would think that African Americans must be overwhelming the admitted class at Harvard. Such is erroneous and terribly misleading. The largest percentage of accepted students by racial classification are whites followed by Asian Americans. 40 percent and 28 percent respectively for those accepted in the Class of 2026. Black students account for 15 percent. The acceptance rate of African Americans poses no threat to either Asian Americans or whites. But this is not the real issue, is it? It does not take a genius to see through the thinly veiled charge of “unfair racial preference” for Black students in this moment of national anti-Black politicking and law-making. Blum’s supposed support of Asian Americans in these cases hasn’t changed his fundamental aims of returning the nation to a static white status quo. These conservative whites and their allies are on a mission to undo the rights that Black people have long fought to achieve in this country. The full realization of those rights rests in the demise of their domination as a political class. This is where their fears are fomented. You cannot talk about fairness and equality for all while you simultaneously outlaw the teaching of one group’s history and accomplishments toward achieving equality for all and make it unlawful to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of this country.
Were he really interested in de-racializing college admissions, he would attack “legacy admissions,” the longest most enduring racialized college admissions policy in the country’s history. First initiated by Ivy League schools in the 1920s to halt the increased enrollment of Jewish students, who then were not yet considered white, legacy admissions have endured to the present time. It represents a pillar of institutional racism in higher education, given the generational wealth gap that it perpetuates for white middle-class families. Legacy admissions provide a “grandfather clause” for segregationist policies. This and similar admissions practices give preferential treatment to white students at the country’s selective colleges and universities. What is left of affirmative action does not come close to balancing the scales of college admission practices that have worked to the benefit of white people for generations.
Equating the racial profiling of African Americans by police with race-conscious admission policies, he plays loose with the facts and traffics in false equivalencies.
Blum’s duplicity is made apparent in a statement he made during an interview he gave with the New York Times. In response to a question about the public benefit of race-conscious college admissions, he said, “Most Americans don’t want race to be part of your application to college. They don’t want the police to use race as a profiling tool to prevent crime. They don’t want prosecutors to use race in the makeup of a jury. Your race and your ethnicity should not be something used to help you or harm you in your life’s endeavors.” Equating the racial profiling of African Americans by police with race-conscious admission policies, he plays loose with the facts and traffics in false equivalencies. The former is rooted in structural racism. The latter is meant to alleviate and redress the injustices created by the former. By reducing it all down to race discrimination, the conservatives have gained the upper hand in a country that has yet to come to terms with the ever-present reality of institutional racism. That willful blindness on all sides of the political spectrum is what permits such talk to be made without the strong swift rebuke it deserves.
Blum’s claim that school admissions should be based strictly on merit is meritless. There has never been a time in this nation’s history when educational advancement was based solely on merit. For longer than many in this country would like to remember, college admissions and the whole of US education were rooted in white supremacy in the advancement of “the white race.” This is the point Justice Thurgood Marshall made in his dissent in the Bakke case that critically weakened affirmative action forty-five years ago and set it up for its death blow with this forthcoming decision.
With this impending decision, it is likely that Marshall’s fear will be realized. The Supreme Court is set to do again what it did in Plessy: undo the affirming acts of the federal government to redress the systemic failure to afford Black people their citizenship rights to equal access under the law. When a lone white man can single-handedly destroy the laws that have provided the legal rights and protections of the only community in this country that was enslaved and segregated by law, we are forced to face both the weakness of the laws in place and the unwillingness of the government in all its faces to enforce Black people’s natural and civil right. We are forced to face the precarious state of Black life in this United States of America.
In the years to come, it may be said (to paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois) that the African American went free, stood a brief moment in the sun of equal rights, then moved back again toward segregation. This is certainly the logical outcome if Blum and his conservative financiers have their way. And to think otherwise, one must be consciously ignorant of history, a white supremacist, or Clarence Thomas.
Ewuare Osayande is the founder of ORIJIN, a racial equity consultancy. A former adjunct professor of African American Studies at Rutgers University, Osayande is pursuing a Juris Doctorate in Washington, D.C. His latest book is entitled Black Phoenix Uprising. Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.
