Malcolm A. Kline of Accuracy in Academia has written a new piece in which he addresses Fisher v. the University of Texas.

Diversity: The New Segregation

Perhaps it takes someone educated in the Civil Rights era to see the startling similarities between yesterday’s segregationists and today’s diversity officers, although the fact that both claim to advance “the common good” should raise suspicions.

“Indeed, the argument that educational benefits justify racial discrimination was advanced in support of racial segregation in the 1950’s, but emphatically rejected by this Court,” U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Fisher v. the University of Texas. “And just as the alleged educational benefits of segregation were insufficient to justify racial discrimination then, see Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), the alleged educational benefits of diversity cannot justify racial discrimination today.”

Specifically, “It is also noteworthy that, in our desegregation cases,  we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to those advanced by the University today,” Justice Thomas notes. “The University asserts, for instance, that the diversity obtained through its discriminatory admissions program prepares its students to become leaders in a diverse society. See, e.g.,  Brief for Respondents 6 (arguing that student body diversity ‘prepares students to become the next generation of leaders in an increasingly diverse society.’)”

“The segregationists likewise defended segregation on the ground that it provided more leadership opportunities for blacks,” He goes on to quote these self-same segregationists:

“[A] very large group  of Northern Negroes [comes] South to attend separate colleges, suggesting that the Negro does not secure as well-rounded a college life at a mixed college, and that the separate college offers him positive advantages; that there is a more normal social life for the Negro in a separate college; that there is a greater opportunity for full participation and for the development of leadership; that the Negro is inwardly more ‘secure’ at a college of his own people”