California has become the fourth state to ban legacy admissions in the college application process, a practice that has long been criticized as favoring white or wealthy students based on their familial alumni connections.
“In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Monday statement. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.”
The decision affects private and nonprofit universities. The University of California system eliminated legacy admission preferences in 1998, according to Newsom’s office.
Using a bad faith argument from Thomas undercuts your position. The way the Right frames Affirmative Action as “reverse racism” and part of their over arching attack on DEI is all done in bad faith. They know removing a policy like Affirmative Action allows them to filter out those they see as “less than” under the cover of equality, when white people have been operating from a position of great advantage, while continuing to chip away at any gains by people of color.
The US has used things like Jim Crow, Redlining, White Flight, and on and on in order to keep an equality divide. Meanwhile white people could always buy homes/land and pass on generational wealth, putting white kids ahead of kids of color from day one, and compounding generation after generation. And that lack of generational wealth plays into a divide in the quality of education as well. And the strawman of “but there are poor white people” is also often trotted out to defend “race-neutral policies” like “admissions to top percentile students”. But having poor white people doesn’t somehow erase generations of oppression against minorities. And people creating a “top percentile student” policy know that statistically they still end up with a more white population as a result.
So a policy like Affirmative Action shouldn’t be framed as giving a minority advantage, it’s more like trying to level the field (for at least a percentage of students) that is titled in one direction.
/rant