Following the Supreme Court’s decision last Thursday to strike down race-conscious admission policies, a host of polling conducted in the past week has shown that African Americans are more likely to support the move than disapprove of it.
A survey by the Economist/YouGov in the week immediately following the ruling found nearly half (44 percent) of African Americans supported the move, as opposed to barely over a third (36 percent) who opposed it.
These figures were echoed in a similar study commissioned by the Washington Post-Schar School poll, which found nearly half of African Americans (47 percent) backed the Supreme Court’s decision.
Consequently, the decision to overturn affirmative action in late June “seem[s] unlikely to spark a significant backlash,” a Post journalist argued, citing the findings.
“On the contrary, perhaps the court’s most momentous decision this year — severely restricting the use of affirmative action in college admissions — was arguably quite popular.”
These numbers skew slightly from a Pew poll conducted in March and April 2023. Although African American adults were more likely to be sympathetic to affirmative action initiatives, less than half of respondents saw them in a positive light. By comparison, a fifth viewed such policies unfavorably.
Part of the dissatisfaction may stem from the belief that affirmative action does not apply or personally help African Americans. Less than a fifth saw race-conscious admissions impacting their lives, with only 11 percent noting it had a positive effect.
In late June, the Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
While universities can still consider an applicant’s perception of how race has impacted his life, Roberts clarified this does not permit colleges to find workarounds to incorporate race-conscious admissions through, for example, application essays.
The “student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,” the Chief Justice wrote in his ruling.