Almost 60 years ago, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action at universities using race to discriminate against applicants moved America closer to the vision of the great civil-rights activist. On the eve of the Fourth of July, it is a timely reassertion of America’s founding spirit that all of her citizens should be afforded the same rights and be treated equally before the law.

Ironically or not, it was the conservative justices, including three Trump appointees and Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by George W Bush but often votes with the leftist justices, who ended the policy of racial discrimination.

The case was brought by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which sued the universities of Harvard and North Carolina for unfairly factoring race into their admissions process resulting in an egregious bias against Asian American applicants.

Their analysis shows that the chance of students ranked in the top 10 per cent in academic terms being accepted into Harvard varies dramatically depending on their race. It is only 12.7 per cent for Asian Americans, 15.3 per cent for white Americans, 31.1 per cent for Hispanic Americans, and 56.1 per cent for African Americans. Indeed, a worse than average African American student, ranked in the bottom 40 per cent in terms of their academic performance, has a 12.8 per cent of getting into Harvard which is better chance of success than that of an Asian American in the top 10 per cent. And an Asian in the bottom 40 per cent has virtually no chance (0.9 per cent) of being accepted. A similar pattern was noted at the University of North Carolina.

This is not news. In 2009, research by Princeton University reported that an Asian American student needed to score 140 points higher than white students on the SAT and 450 points higher than black students to have the same chance of admission to private colleges.

Asian students score on average 160 points higher on the SAT than the overall average (1223 vs. 1059), but this achievement based on hard work and sacrifice may still not secure acceptance by institutions that are biased against them on racial grounds.

A recently leaked 2017 spreadsheet on the PhD admission program for the Department of Economics at Harvard gave another glimpse of flagrant race-based selection at this supposedly elite education institution. The spreadsheet identifies certain students as ‘Minority,’ presumably giving them an advantage. Yet while 12 of the 44 admitted students were Asians, none of them were labelled as ‘Minority’.

This discrimination explains why an American of Indian descent, Vijay Chokal-Ingam, pretended he was black to get into medical school. He later became an outspoken advocate against affirmative action.

In addition to harming Asian Americans, affirmative action is bad for black students. Decades ago, great black scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter E Williams, and others pointed out that using race quotas to draft lower-performing black students into top colleges does not help anyone, least of all black students. The universities acquire a reputation for an artificial and shallow diversity, and many of these otherwise capable black students fail at an institution to which they are not suited.

Affirmative action is an insult to Blacks and Latino minorities. It implies that they cannot get into Harvard or MIT on their own merit without a leg up. It also means that their achievements are forever tainted by the possibility that their success was the result of race-based favouritism rather than talent and hard work.

One can think of Vice-President Kamala Harris who spent over $40 million after announcing her presidential run in 2019 but received no delegates and withdrew before the primaries. She nevertheless became the Vice-President after President Biden announced he would choose a black female as his vice-presidential running mate. Her lacklustre performance illustrates the dangers of adopting race-based bias to placate the leftist Woke brigade.

Despite the shrill outcries of the dissenting Justices, President Biden, and the leadership of prestigious universities, polls show that the majority of Americans approve of the Supreme Court decision on race-based selection of student for colleges.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll of over 900 Americans found that 52 per cent approved, while only 32 per cent disapproved. Broken down by party, 75 per cent of Republicans and 58 per cent of independents approved, but only 26 per cent of Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February with almost 4,500 adults found that 62 per cent of Americans they surveyed, including 73 per cent of Republicans and 46 per cent of Democrats, were against race being used as a factor in college admissions.

While the elites who are drunk on affirmative action Kool-Aid will not give up their dogma, this ruling is a momentous occasion that rights the keel of a country that in recent years has been harangued by ideologues who are keen to do what sounds good rather than what works.

As Sowell puts it:

Racism does not have a good track record. It’s been tried out for a long time, and you’d think by now we’d want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

Xin Du, Ph.D. is a writer and editor based in Melbourne.