Don’t Support Trump View on School Admissions? Maybe You’re the Racist!

Legal guidance from the federal government favoring race preferences in college and university admissions was wiped away by the Trump Administration.

Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper says that’s a good thing, and he questioned those who insist affirmative action policies are absolutely necessary for black students to succeed.

In a blow to the radical policies favored during the Obama presidency, guidance letters to educators issued between 2011 and 2016 that cited racial diversity as a “compelling interest” were revoked by Trump officials. While this does not set up new rules for admissions policies, it does encourage school officials to consider a wide array of student attributes and be race-neutral in their selection process.

In a debate on the Fox News Channel program “The Ingraham Angle,” Horace took on television and talk radio host Rolanda Watts’s assertion that this is “knocking down anything Obama” and that there “needs to be a fairness, a diversity” because “you can’t say those days [of racial discrimination] are over.”

But Watts could not rebut Horace’s point that those who insist upon racial preferences appear to be making their affirmative action demands out of a perceived need more than for fairness.  He said:

It was always overreach with the guidance letters.

The Supreme Court has never said affirmative action for affirmative action’s sake was a great thing. It always said it had to be a last resort. It had to be narrowly tailored.

What these guidance letters did was exactly the opposite. If you’re a good school, you need to do this. Now, it implies that we won’t have scientists, we won’t have doctors, we won’t have any bright people [of color].

I say that’s racist if you believe there will never be astronauts, there will never be scientists or bright people who are black without extra help on the part of the government with affirmative action.



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