North Carolina's Republican legislative majorities goes too far in executing the Supreme Court decision regarding Affirmative Action. Now, even scholarships designated to elevate minority students in their financial burden for a higher education cannot be applied.
By John Hammer
The University of North Carolina System (click here) has issued directives to its 17 campuses, including two in Greensboro – the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) and North Carolina Agricultural and Technology State University (NCA&TSU) – on how to comply with the recent US Supreme Court decision on admissions.
The directive states that the Supreme Court decision in “Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College found that race-conscious admissions practices violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and therefore must end.”
The directive states, “Race can be neither a means nor an end in college admissions. This applies to admissions practices both written and unwritten, and there is no wiggle room – no institution may try to achieve indirectly what the Court prohibited directly.”
The directive recommends removing the “race box” from applications in the future, while noting that it exists on current applications. It states, “Asking applicants to indicate their race on their applications likely will force campuses to prove that their express knowledge of an applicant’s race did not factor into the decision to admit or deny the student. Proving a negative is always difficult, even more so when the question turns on reading the mind of an admissions officer who could know the race of the applicant.”
The directive notes that the Supreme Court decision recognizes that diversity of other types other than race can be constitutionally sound goals, but warns that these goals must be “race blind” and “cannot be proxies or pretexts to achieve racial targets prohibited” by the Supreme Court decision.
The directive also notes that the rationale in the Supreme Court decision “will be extended to other instances where university actors use race in allocating university resources.” It recommends that universities evaluate scholarships and aid programs that take race into consideration and states, “Programs that offer opportunities for students based on race to the exclusion of others, who are not of the same race, may also be implicated by the Court’s ruling.”
The overall theme of the directives is that universities should follow both the letter and the spirit of the Supreme Court decision.
One conversation that is not on the national agenda is that the US Supreme Court and it's wildly adverse decisions is all happening in the context of racial violence in the USA.
THAT MATTERS.
If American minorities aren't feeling the pain of institutionalized racism today, then they are out of touch with the violence with communities and the backlash of a Supreme Court that cares little about women and minorities and their freedoms.
The context within the country that these Supreme Court decisions are being made reflect a court that is adverse to domestic peace and the rights of citizens. Their decisions add fuel to the race fire already ignited within the USA. I sincerely believe the Robert's Court is hostile to the domestic peace every American has a right to enjoy.
In the span of a week, (click here) I went from mourning those murdered in a Buffalo supermarket shooting to mourning children murdered at an elementary school in Texas. As a Black woman, I went from internalizing the message that I am not even safe to go grocery shopping to fearing the reality that my child may not come home after being dropped off at class.
In the weeks leading up to this, I was contacted by several mayors and superintendents who wanted my help thinking about how they could respond to the legislative acts that are removing history – and now math books that teach history – from its classrooms. One superintendent asked, “How can they ban our math books, but then ask us to use those mathematical principles to comply with a mandate that we teach financial literacy?” She was referring to the fact that as history, literature and math books are being banned, mandates for financial literacy are on the rise. I responded quickly and said, “Financial literacy does not place a premium on remembering the past. Really, financial literacy is just a social narrative that places the burden of ending or overcoming wealth inequality on the people who suffer from it most. So, the parallel is on brand.”
So, when I saw the results of NEFE’s High School Personal Finance Education Poll, I knew it was time to talk about the relationship between personal finance, financial literacy and white supremacy.
There seems to be a general consensus that there is a growing need for financial knowledge. Reasons offered span from the emergence of a wider variety of financial products on the market to the increase of financial responsibility in areas like paying for college and retirement planning. Many have now also accepted that the increasing need for financial literacy education is because economic inequality is worsening. While this may be true, it continues to perturb me that few – if any – researchers are curious about the interrelatedness of the growing need for financial knowledge and the rapidly increasing presence of white supremacist violence.
That is the purpose of this publication: to propose a framework for understanding the relationship between financial literacy education and white supremacy....
The Republican Party has targeted African American women and the abortion statistic in that they are the victim of racism in causing them to have a higher abortion rate. Who talks about abortion during Black History Month? The Republican wackos on FOX News. The extremist Supreme Court must be thinking they are the saviors of the African American race. Damn poverty and financial inequality, end abortion which has always been a socio-economic issue.
February 1, 2023
Black History Month begins this week, (click here) just two weeks after tens of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for the 50th annual March for Life. This month and the March for Life collectively present an important opportunity to highlight two of the most pressing issues facing America’s Black community today: abortion and fatherlessness....
August 6, 2008
...These activists (click here) are exploiting and distorting the facts to serve their antiabortion agenda. They ignore the fundamental reason women have abortions and the underlying problem of racial and ethnic disparities across an array of health indicators. The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. This applies to all women—black, white, Hispanic, Asian and Native American alike. Not surprisingly, the variation in abortion rates across racial and ethnic groups relates directly to the variation in the unintended pregnancy rates across those same groups.
Black women are not alone in having disproportionately high unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. The abortion rate among Hispanic women, for example, although not as high as the rate among black women, is double the rate among whites. Hispanics also have a higher level of unintended pregnancy than white women. Black women's unintended pregnancy rates are the highest of all. These higher unintended pregnancy rates reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time. Moreover, these realities must be seen in a larger context in which significant racial and ethnic disparities persist for a wide range of health outcomes, from diabetes to heart disease to breast and cervical cancer to sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV....
