From diversity to reparations: The new front in the equal justice debate
Many new ideas have sprouted in California and made their way East across the country. A Black state legislator from Los Angeles has come up with an idea that deserves to make that journey and has the potential to reframe the debate over college admissions.
California Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, who has an academic background in public policy, has proposed the state’s colleges, public and private, be allowed to grant preference to applicants descended from enslaved people. Bryan has argued that approach would get around the Supreme Court’s retro ban on considering race in admissions and California’s own ban under state law since 1996.
“For decades, universities gave preferential admission treatment to legacy donors and their family members, while ignoring admission outcomes for applicants directly impacted by legacies of harm and exclusion,” Bryan has explained. “These intentional decisions have resulted in stark and measurable achievement differences that have documented ties back to slavery in the United States.”
Colleges consider the lineage of legacy students who receive preference in admissions and the children of employees eligible for free tuition. So why can’t colleges consider the lineage of descendants of slaves?
But isn’t that lineage just a proxy for race? Think again. Most people enslaved on these shores were of African descent, yes. Early on, Native Americans were also enslaved along the East Coast. Today there are undoubtedly Americans, self-identified as white, who have a distant enslaved ancestor, particularly in the South.
Bryan’s proposal wouldn’t restore the breadth of the explicit consideration of race in admissions that the Supreme Court outlawed two years ago. Left out would be descendants of people enslaved in the Caribbean, Mexico or South America as well as recent African immigrants. So too would be most Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans.
But considering slavery would reconnect college admissions to the original reason for considering race — to make up for centuries of enslavement and discrimination against Americans of color.
That reasoning shifted in 1978. What today is called diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, started with just diversity, the idea that having a diverse mix of students on campus has educational benefits for all. That idea didn’t come from civil rights leaders, but from a lawyer from Virginia that Richard Nixon nominated to the Supreme Court.
Justice Lewis Powell enunciated the diversity argument for considering race in his controlling opinion in court’s split decision in the Bakke case, which involved a white man suing because his application was rejected by the medical school at the University of California Davis, which reserved a set number of seats for Black applicants. The court held such quotas were not allowed. Powell specifically endorsed Harvard’s system of considering race as one factor in admissions as constitutional.
Civil rights lawyers initially saw the Bakke decision as a devastating defeat. Over time, they embraced the diversity or DEI argument, because that’s all they had to try to remedy centuries of discrimination and exclusion. It was always a thin reed to stand on. Two years ago, the Trump-orchestrated majority on the Supreme Court did away with that in two cases, one involving Harvard.
Descent from the enslaved is a firmer basis for making college a wider pathway for reversing the lingering effects of an inhumane system. So too are Jim Crow and the institutional racism that has been maintained since the mid-1960s.
One reason President Trump and his allies are trying to erase Black history as they go about obliterating DEI initiatives is because slavery and the treatment of Americans of color since then justify those measures, limited as they are.
The California legislature passed Assemblyman Bryan’s bill last month. But Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the legislation October 13, calling it unnecessary because the state’s colleges already have the authority to grant such a preference in admissions. Newsom is angling to run for president, and Black voters across the country should remember his low profile in courage should he enter the Democratic primaries in 2028.
In the meantime, the California Assembly and Senate should override Newsom’s veto. Both chambers passed the bill with more than the necessary two-thirds majority.
Another Black elected official, this time in the heartland, has stated another way to reshape the debate about DEI initiatives. In St. Louis, the white mayor, facing pressure from the Trump administration, suspended the city’s goals for contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses. After Black contractors pushed back, Mayor Cara Spencer restarted the contracting program last month.
Black Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, the equivalent of a city councilwoman, explained why St. Louis need not fear an anti-DEI attack from the Trump administration.
“The City of St. Louis does not have a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program. We have an anti-discrimination program based on disparity studies that show statistical evidence of discrimination against minority- and women-owned businesses,” Sonnier said.
Like Assemblyman Bryan in California, Alderwoman Sonnier cast the effort as a remedy for past violations of rights. That’s a stronger argument than DEI. Black people and our allies need to make that argument over and over again. Force Trump administration officials to try to deny slavery and Jim Crow ever happened or somehow don’t matter. Then remind them both periods endured much longer than the DEI era.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
