By Camille G. Caldera, Crimson Staff Writer October 9, 2019
Students for Fair Admissions’s lead trial lawyer Adam K. Mortara denounced the recent ruling in the Harvard admissions lawsuit, arguing at a Harvard Law School event Tuesday that the judge had misinterpreted the case’s facts and legal precedents. …
The lawsuit has exposed thousands of pages of internal documents, shedding light on the College’s famously secretive admissions process. One such document was a 2013 report by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research, which found that Asian American applicants consistently receive lower personal ratings — numerical scores assigned to applicants based on abstract qualities like “humor” and “grit.” …
Mortara also challenged Burroughs’ tacit acceptance of the discrepancy in personal ratings as insufficient evidence of discrimination.
“No one — not Judge Burroughs, not Harvard — has ever explained how it is that African Americans and Hispanics just have much better objective personal qualities than white and Asian applicants,” he said. “They’ve never done it.”
“I guess there’s just something more personally appealing about African American and Hispanic applicants,” Mortara quipped. In response, at least a dozen students in the crowd voiced their agreement, shouting, “There is!”
“Diversity” was always an unstable conceptual foundation for the affirmative action regime. It has required ever more intense emotional investment in the supposed benefits that non-Asian non-whites conferred on others simply through their proximity.
Each legal challenge to affirmative action has ramped up this investment; the Asian-American discrimination lawsuit has turned it into a more or less overt form of idolatry.
“Diversity” was originally an expedient whereby conservative-minded judges reconciled themselves to permitting a form of “positive” discrimination which cut against the grain of the race-neutrality enshrined into both the equal protection clause and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The premise was that a diverse nation required diverse leadership, so whatever was needed to make that happen was a pragmatic necessity, and we were prepared to do that.
This pragmatism has given way to a form of racial mysticism that makes it not just defensible but somehow compulsory to shout out that some racial groups are inherently more appealing than others.
The “more than a dozen” Harvard Law School students reacted instantly and spontaneously — each individual responding alone, but as if coordinated by a shared set of assumptions.
Nothing could be more revealing about the underlying premise that has been affirmed in a federal court.
There’s an enormous effort at present among the type of people who attend Harvard Law School to reprogram their basic instincts to see black women’s hair as more attractive than blonde women’s hair to avoid slipping up and getting Canceled out of a fabulous career.
One of the odder side effects is that even though the hair of East Asian women and MesoAmerican women is quite similar, Asians are currently seen as “white-adjacent” and thus Bad, while the latter are seen as black-adjacent and thus objectively better.
At least in theory. In practice, nobody much cares about mestizos, other than their swelling numbers.
