My son is in his third year as a sociology major and mass media minor at a major university here in New York. I’ve always fancied myself as an amateur sociologist/historian, so I was beyond ecstatic when he chose sociology as his major. He and I have always had in-depth conversations about society, history, and politics, but before his higher learning I was doing most of the talking and he the listening. It’s different now. He is engaged and fully equipped to contribute. Sometimes, to the point where I can barely get a word in.
The Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA) Case
Recently, while we were having one of our conversations, my wife showed us a post about The Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). It’s the organization that brought a lawsuit last year against Harvard University to force them to stop its Affirmative Action based recruiting programs.
SFFA’s Legal Battle Against Harvard
In 2013, SFFA filed suit against Harvard in the U.S. District Court in Boston, stating that the university’s admission practices were unconstitutional. On November 17, 2014, SFFA filed the lawsuit in federal district court representing a group of anonymous Asian American plaintiffs who were previously denied admission by the University. In 2019, a district court judge ruled in Harvard’s favor and upheld its limited use of race as a factor in admissions, stating that SFFA had provided no evidence that Asian Americans, or any other racial groups, had been harmed by it. In 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling. In 2021, SFFA petitioned the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Finally, in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the SFFA stating that race-based affirmative action processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Supreme Court’s Controversial Ruling
This made no sense to me. The Fourteenth Amendment’s sole purpose was to protect Black Americans from discrimination, so for the U.S. Supreme Court to use it, a race-based law, as the vehicle to overturn racial preference in schools’ admission practices, citing them as being discriminatory and unconstitutional, was a farce. Every court before this, not surprisingly, ruled against the SFFA, but It’s no coincidence that they found success at the U.S. Supreme Court and its majority ultra conservative justices. The same justices that overturned Roe vs Wade, portions of the Voters Rights, and Fair Housing Acts.
Understanding Post Truth
What does this have to do with post truth? What is post truth? Post-truth refers to a situation in today’s politics where facts have lost their significance in public conversations. It is characterized by personal beliefs having priority over factual accuracy. In other words, the facts are clear but are ignored in favor of a personal feeling or desire. This phenomenon gained attention during events such as the Brexit referendum, when the citizens of the UK voted to leave the European Union, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, where campaigns relied on emotive and often false statements to sway voters. Post-truth politics disregards the importance of truth and instead focuses on appealing to emotions for political gain.
Post Truth and the SFFA Lawsuit
What do Post Truths have to do with The Students for Fair Admissions and their lawsuit? The article my wife showed me was about the SFFA threatening to file another lawsuit against other elite schools for not complying with the Supreme Court ruling. On September 17th, 2024, the SFFA sent letters to Princeton, Yale, and Duke. The letters said, “Based on SFFA’s extensive experience, your racial numbers are not possible under true neutrality. A drop in the enrollment of Asian American students since last year went against expectations. Enrollment of Black students remained mostly the same.”
SFFA’s Flawed Logic and Bias
There is so much to unpack here. In SFFA’s logic, because the Black enrollment in these elite schools remained relatively the same a year after the ruling and the Asian enrollment dropped, then the obvious conclusion to them is that these schools could not have possibly complied with the Supreme Court ruling. Their exact statement was, “Your racial numbers are not possible under true neutrality”. “It went against expectations”, they said. In their minds, the only way that the Black applicants could have been accepted to these elite schools had to be because of racial preferences. They totally ignored the possibility that at these schools, affirmative action may have been assisting the Asian applicants more than the Black applicants so when the racial preferences were removed, Black applicants were unaffected while the Asian applicants were. That rationale seems more plausible than assuming immediately the schools were non-compliant. SFFA’s bias however would not let them consider this data. Their bias told them if racial preferences are taken away then the obvious result would be that Black enrollment would drop. They could not possibly be earning the enrollment to Harvard on their own. As my family came to this point of the conversation, our future sociologist son said, “we had a class on this, this is what is called post truth.” Up to this point I had never heard that term before.
The Flaws in SFFA’s Data Interpretation
The data, from these few elite schools at least, should have shown the SFFA that after a year had passed since the Supreme Court ruling, the data did not support their expectations. An organization that really cared about the data would wait for more time to pass so that they could acquire enough data which could possibly support their premise. They, however, felt comfortable moving forward with threatening these schools with a lawsuit based purely on what they felt should have happened instead of the actual data. This is what post truth is. I’m sure if the SFFA had a chance to respond to this they would say we looked at data from other schools also and that data supported our expected outcome. For example, at the school that the lawsuit was brought against, Harvard University, the Black enrollment did decrease by 4%. The previous year the Black student enrollment was 18% and a year after the ruling it dropped to 14%. Also, the Asian enrollment remained unchanged. Though the Asian enrollment didn’t increase as anticipated, the SFFA would see the drop in Black American enrollment as supporting their expectations. A closer look though, shows that the data the SFFA presented in the lawsuit, stated that removing the racial preferences from the admissions practices of Harvard would lower the Black Americans enrollment to less than 5%. That is more than a 13% decrease. Instead, it was only a 4% drop. Add that the 4% drop could be contributed to other things, like, for example, the fact that enrollment to HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) is up 30% from last year. This means that the 4% drop in the Black enrollment at Harvard can easily be explained by a percentage of Black students instead of enrolling at Harvard, enrolled at HBCUs. Considering this data though would not fit SFFA’s objective. What was the objective? In my opinion, it wasn’t to support the Asian students, but to target affirmative action. SFFA used the Asian students plight to target Affirmative Action and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in education. Using the Asian community, the “model minority” as the tool.
The Conservative Roots of SFFA
How did I come to this assessment? I looked at the history. This is not new for the SFFA. They were created by a conservative activist named Edward Blum in 2014 to attack affirmative action in universities. Blum is also the founder of Project on Fair Representation. This organization’s stated goal is to end racial classifications in education, voting procedures, legislative redistricting, and employment. Blum’s organizations have historically been about ending any progress that was made by the Civil Rights Act. Edward Blum might as well have said that his organizations were created to bring “Jim Crow” back.
The Myth of a Post-Racial Society
Most conservatives since the election of President Obama in 2008, say that today we live in a post-racial society. It’s this argument that they use to support the dismantling of the Civil Rights Act. Are we in a post racial time in society? Most definitely not! I know it sounds like an exaggeration to state that Blum and others like him are trying to bring Jim Crow back, but considering that the Civil Rights Act was passed to counter all that Jim Crow denied to the Black community and Blum’s organizations were created to reverse it, much like MAGA’s (make America great again ) objective, it seems like a logical conclusion to arrive at. All of these campaigns are based on discrimination and discrimination is not logical. Discrimination cannot be supported by facts and has always been supported by some form of mistruth; post truth just happens to be the latest strategy.
Post Truth in Modern Politics
The phenomenon of post truths gained attention during events such as the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, where campaigns relied on emotive and often false statements to sway voters. As I stated earlier, post-truth politics disregards the importance of truth and instead focuses on appealing to emotions for political gain. Some may argue then that the white superiority propaganda, used to justify slavery and Jim Crow, was an example of post truth. Though it is true that this propaganda was not based on facts, the difference between it and post truths is that there was a concerted effort to create facts to justify the propaganda for slavery and Jim Crow. The Bible was used, and psychological and medical journals were used. In post truth, the concept is not used to suggest that the truth does not exist, but that facts become secondary to the political point of view.
Examples of Post Truth in Recent History
For example, in the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, fact-checkers counted that former President Trump lied over 30 times. The most infamous being that undocumented Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of Springfield, Ohio residents. All this, despite the moderator fact checking Trump on the spot using statements from Springfield Ohio officials. Also, it was reported that these immigrants were actually documented and invited to Springfield through a program to occupy needed jobs. Despite this information, Trump didn’t blink. He didn’t retract an obvious and ridiculous lie. He doubled down on it to appeal to the sentiment of his voting base. Despite the facts. In the past, a candidate would have been lambasted for this, but not Trump. He mastered the post truth style of campaigning in 2016. He started his campaign with the now infamous birther propaganda. Claiming that President Obama was not born in the U.S. despite proof that confirmed Obama was born in Hawaii, and the claim that there was fraud in the 2020 election despite evidence to the contrary. The most egregious example was during Trump’s presidency, when he denied the severity of the COVID pandemic despite having evidence to the contrary months before the public had knowledge. This resulted in severe economic impact on the country and worse, a major loss of life (over 3 million in the US).
Conclusion: Post Racial Society or Post Truth?
Are we in a post racial society or post truth? Some would say post racial. They feel that the term racism is used too much today. That, what some call racism is just a difference of opinion in how society should be structured. The facts tell me differently though. Not many will argue that Jim Crow was a racist policy and that the Civil Rights Act was created to directly counter it. Not many will argue that there are major efforts today to counter the civil rights policies, including voting, housing, employment, and education. The only logical conclusion then is that these efforts are rooted in the objective to bring back those policies that were supported by Jim Crow. If we agree then that Jim Crow was rooted in racism, then the facts say that these efforts to reverse the Civil Rights Act must also be rooted in racism. I dare to say then that any argument otherwise is a perfect example of Post Truth.
Edward Odom
