Today (August 7) marks President Donald Trump’s 200th day in the Oval Office. Since taking the highest position in the land, he has been making several controversial moves, and a recent one could impact many Black and Latino scholars.
The New York Times has reported that the Trump administration may be investigating and looking into possibly suing universities over affirmative action admission policies that they think are discriminatory towards white applicants.
NYT obtained an internal announcement to the Justice Department’s civil rights division asking for lawyers who were interesting in working on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions.”
Although the documents don’t say who is considered at risk of “intentional race-based discrimination,” we can take a wild guess based on the language of the memo.
We have seen this before. Just last year, the hashtag #StayMadAbby ripped through social media and headlines. Abigail Fisher, a white woman from Sugar Land, Texas, sued the University of Texas after they denied her admission to its Austin campus in 2008. Texas high school seniors who are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class are granted admission to any state university. Fisher did not make the cut because reportedly her grades were not good enough. But instead of accepting her defeat, she claimed she didn’t make it in due to affirmative action.
The U.S. Supreme Court (and many others) disagreed with the young white woman and made a decision that upheld the affirmative action program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Affirmative Action was put into place in the 1960s to eliminate unlawful discrimination towards disadvantaged groups due to prior discriminatory practices and to prevent discrimination in the future.
It is unclear at the moment what is to come of this potential affirmative action lawsuit. However, it does show the threat of a new conservative nation we could be living in due to the direction of President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.