Nikole Hannah-Jones vs. Color-Blindness

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

 

It is not surprising that the occasional New York Times writer, in a long essay, does not make a solid case that anyone has “hijacked” color-blindness to subvert its original (!) purpose. Or that she at no point presents the case for color-blindness, or engages with any of its advocates, if only to refute it and them.

 

Yet the essay is not without interest. Hannah-Jones believes in affirmative action as a form of redress for the ongoing harms of slavery and Jim Crow. In 1978, however, the Supreme Court rejected this reparative rationale. Justice Powell’s controlling opinion held that accepting it would gut the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Instead, the Court upheld affirmative action in college admissions as a means to achieve a diverse student body.

 

Hannah-Jones laments the consequences of that decision.

 

Campuses certainly became more “diverse” as admissions offices focused broadly on recruiting students who were not white. But the descendants of slavery, for whom affirmative action originated, remain underrepresented among college students, especially at selective colleges and universities. At elite universities, research shows, the Black population consists disproportionately of immigrants and children of immigrants rather than students whose ancestors were enslaved here.

 

This concession is bigger than Hannah-Jones acknowledges. It means that the university policy that pro-color-blindness activists challenged really did amount to a kind of discrimination that not even she is willing to justify.

 

Earlier, she discusses Andrew Johnson’s veto of a bill to grant citizenship to black people, a veto he cast in part on the ground that it would be unfair to immigrants seeking citizenship. A vile argument, to be sure. Hannah-Jones writes that Johnson’s veto message “foreshadowed the arguments about Asian immigrants and their children that would be echoed 150 years later in Students for Fair Admissions.”

 

Aiding people who were enslaved and whose immediate ancestors were enslaved, and only those people, is different in principle from aiding people on the basis of their skin color — as Hannah-Jones’s essay itself explains. Her comparison is wrong. It is also obnoxious.