13

13 (centre aligned)
court struck down race-conscious university admissions.
Interestingly, the district court subsequently denied damages to the white plaintiffs, finding that none of them would have been attained under a "colorblind" admissions policy.
At Harvard College, about nine out of 10 applicants are denied admission. Fifteen percent of the student body is black or Hispanic. "Even if every one of these students were forced to surrender his place to a white or Asian student ... acceptance rates for white and Asian students would increased by only one or two percentage point. "¹⁷
Harvard could accommodate more students by denying admission to some legacies; their average SAT score is lower than the scores of black students, but no one seems to think they ought to be kept out of because they are less deserving.
Again, Class cannot become a substitute for race without resegregation. Again, "[t]he problem is in the numbers. "¹⁸
Although blacks are disproportionately low income compared with whites, a majority of those with family incomes below $20,000 is neither black nor Hispanic.¹⁹
In college admissions, the "data suggest that the main beneficiaries of a color-blind policy emphasizing class disadvantage would be low-income whites and Asians."²⁰
The most recent research "shows that there is no good substitute for affirmative action admission efforts targeted at historically excluded groups. Any substitute criteria will be likely to bypass many of the best prepared black and Latino students, who may face many forms of radical discrimination but are neither poor nor isolated in the weakest schools."²¹
There is evidence that the anti-affirmative action forces can be beaten. The ballot initiative approach has sputtered and faltered in several cases. Last year anti-affirmative aciton legislation was defeated in the legislature of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee. This year the legislatures of