The end of affirmative action
“Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment of the Negro is raised,” wrote Martin Luther King in 1963, “some of our friends recoil in horror.” ( Why We Can’t Wait ) The US Supreme Court, nourished by newly minted Federalist Society jurists — and no friend of African Americans, delivered the coup de grace to affirmative action in higher education. This counterrevolution was decades in the making, the culmination of a steady erosion since the late 1980s. Even the 1977 Bakke decision upheld affirmative action not on the basis of compensation, but because the experience of...