Giancarlo Canaparo, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, joins The Mark Reardon Show to discuss the Supreme Court of the United States hearing arguments in two cases that could determine whether colleges can continue to use racial preferences in the admissions process.
“America has a complicated racial past. A lot of it really bad. Thank heavens for the civil rights movement. The Supreme Court comes around later and says, ‘look, the equal protection clause means that everyone gets to be treated equally. That's what we put it down. And we had a bad history of ignoring it. But equal protection means everyone's equal and everyone gets treated as an individual’. But they created an exception for colleges. They said colleges can discriminate on the basis of race because they need to be able to craft a diverse student body because that gives some sort of educational benefits. And we fundamentally just trust that colleges will use this special discrimination ability wisely,” Canaparo explained
Later, he continued, “Well you've got the three liberal justices who are passionately in defense of this. You've got the six conservatives who seem pretty solidly against it. I think the real heart of the case came into question from Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Clarence Thomas knows discrimination. He grew up during Jim Crow. He said to one of the lawyers for the schools, ‘If this case was brought in 1960 And the school was defending its segregationist policies on the grounds that they produce educational benefits, which is what segregationists did do in the 1960s, would we have trusted the school?’. And the lawyer had to say no of course not. And that gets to the heart of this issue. What the court has allowed colleges to do is just to discriminate and we have trusted that they're gonna use it wisely, they're gonna use it nicely.”
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