I recently participated, at ScotusBlog’s kind invitation, in its symposium on the Fisher II case, and you can read my contribution to it here (and you can see a list of the other contributions here). There were no surprises in the arguments made in favor of the University of Texas’s racial discrimination, but I did want to address briefly one particularly outrageous claim, since I’ve seen it made elsewhere.
The argument was (and variations on it have been) made that, if you oppose universities’ giving a preference on the basis of race or ethnicity, it follows that “if an applicant wrote an admissions essay about volunteering for an Asian-American charity or growing up in Ferguson, then that essay would presumably have to be disregarded or discarded.” This is false and silly. That is, counting it in someone’s favor that she did charitable work is not the same thing as counting it in her favor that she has a particular skin color. Duh. If someone shows leadership qualities by being president of the African-American Club, it’s fine to count that in his favor if you’re looking for someone with leadership qualities, assuming that you would do the same for the president of the Irish American Club or whatever. Sheesh.