and why it s important for them to lift up their own lived experiences and when those are affected by their race. and so we knew it was going to be tough. but we also felt that we had done what we needed to do. if this court was going to try and pull down on affirmative action or pull down on the progress that we made, it should have been very tough for them to have done that. sounds like it was pretty easy for them, and ironically, you re the one who had students with you. elie, eager to hear your thoughts. the supreme court got it wrong in terms of the law, the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment was not passed to help white sons like jared kushner and brett kavanaugh get into school. the first time we had affirmative action in this country was not the 1960s. it was the 1860s. we had affirmative action during
name on a building. they can still get in. their affirmative action seems quite in place. what do you make of that. i totally agree. that s still true today. there s also, you know, we have seen it in other cases like the back door, the side door, other ways to get into harvard. but they just struck it down just for black students and brown students on campus. to be able to have specific access due to, like, disadvantages in specific circumstances. when i was there, one of the other experiences i had is the so-called affirmative action kids were some of the most brilliant i ever met. ketanji brown jackson was there when i was here. this is a brilliant human being, and they were hard working. the affluent kids didn t have to work as hard. i wonder what you make of the fact this court seems to think choosing students like you is an affront to the constitution? no, it s really crazy. at least in my experience, i really found that my race is my
barack obama existing and not being essentially, a hand puppet as president, and being quiet, and waving, and saying thank you white people for letting me be president. his retribution is this court, and they are getting it for him. you go back to the original slogan, make america great again, going backwards. their portrait of what a great america is the time before women had rights, before there were any marches for a quality, before people of color could have a fighting chance to compete in higher education, and now they re big accomplishment is that they haven t ruled all of the progress we made in this country. that it is mind-blowing to me that the child born right now will have less rights than we did when we were born. how is that possible that we got to the point where we are seeing progress completely rolled back, and it goes back to the early conversation. institutionalism is in going to work. the institution wasn t designed for the wrecking ball that is the modern republi
and in rage about that. it feels to me like this court represents that same rage. they hate these changes, these modernizations and the latino community is at the center of a lot of that anger. what do you make of this decision? exactly. i think what the supreme court was trying to do today was to take us back, and to deny the fact that racial discrimination has existed, has existed since the beginning of our country, and that racial discrimination against native americans, against enslaved blacks, against those who then came later, latinos, aapi, and so many more, that that took a lot of work to create. and that s why affirmative action was important. we needed to be able to create that opportunity so that we could undo the discrimination, so we could undo the inequality. i agee with justice sotomayor s
it seems fitting that we continue to have this because we had a lot we had a couple centuries of that violence and that history compared to just a few decades of being free of that, even at the university of north carolina, they had that university was created in 1789 to serve the children of slave owners at the time, and they fought for 200 years to continue to exclude black students. so we knew going in to the argument that it was going to be a tough sell for this court, this sitting court. prior courts with republican appointed and democratic appointed justices had put aside those differences of politicized opinions, but this court through some of its questions you could kind of start reading through. we did feel very strongly that the law, the facts, and the constitution were on our side. and we had strong evidence from our own students discussing how