A Constitution guru praised the Supreme Court on Thursday for outlawing affirmative action in the college admissions process and blasted critics of the landmark ruling who don’t believe Black and Hispanic candidates are capable based on merit alone.
“The Supreme Court’s taking a position that every one of us is fundamentally equal, regardless of the color of your skin,” Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow GianCarlo Canaparo told Fox News Digital. “This is a huge threat to the fundamental foundation of many people’s worldview.”
Canaparo, who is a Senior Legal Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said the 6-3 decision “is a very powerful reminder that this Constitution is founded on the principle of absolute equality.”
“All men are created equal, and that means what it says,” Canaparo said. “There have been many times in the nation’s history, many times in the Supreme Court’s history, where that principle has been subordinated to collective concerns. But today, the Supreme Court said that that is not the case in university admissions.”
Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that a “benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination.”
Canaparo believes many on the left are worked up over the ruling because they “fundamentally believe” in the words of anti-racist advocate Professor Ibram X. Kendi, who is one of the leading figures pushing for the inclusion of critical race theory in schools.
“Their argument is that the cure to the disease is more of the same,” Canaparo said.
As conservatives rejoiced, the mainstream media could barely hide its disgust. Many pundits claimed that the decision was heartbreaking, that it favors White people at the expense of every other minority, and ushers in an era of Supreme Court decisions that could end up reinstating Jim Crow laws in the United States of America.
In a tweet that didn’t sit particularly well with Canaparo, The New York Times chimed in: “Breaking News: The Supreme Court rejected affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. The major ruling curtails race-conscious college admissions in the U.S., all but ensuring that elite institutions become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.”
Canaparo blasted the Gray Lady, “My response to the argument that this means that there will be fewer Black and Hispanic students in the institutions is, how dare you? How dare you assume that they are not just as capable as everyone else?”
“Poverty affects people of all colors equally, and poverty is a stumbling block. The color of your skin is not,” Canaparo said.
“Race-based admissions programs have stopped people of all sorts of deserving attributes and qualities and intellects from getting into schools. But the idea that Black people, the idea which is baked into this argument that Black people, Hispanic people and other certain minorities don’t have what it takes is profoundly offensive,” he continued. “What you ought to be doing instead is encouraging them to live up to the same standards you set for everybody else.”
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Other peeved liberals included “The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg, who called out Justice Clarence Thomas as being “full of it” and wondered if it would lead to “no women in colleges.”
Canaparo said Goldberg can rest easy, as there is “no risk” that universities won’t have women.
“In fact, some universities have the opposite problem. They don’t have enough men typically,” Canaparo said.
“What the Supreme Court has said is that what matters is academic merit and those other qualities which contribute to true diversity. That’s diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of character,” he said. “What Supreme Court said is that the color of your skin is not real diversity.”
Canaparo believes the notion that two people can have the same thoughts, experiences or beliefs just because of the color of their skin is essentially “the sort of impermissible stereotyping that the country has been fighting for hundreds of years.”
Many, including Canaparo, expect that schools will try to escape this decision one way or another.
“What they’ll do, if they’re not willing to really break the rules explicitly, is target race neutral parameters. So, for instance, they will give preferences to zip codes where they know there are not a lot of Asians,” Canaparo predicted.
“They’ll give disadvantages to zip codes where they know there are a lot of Whites. They’ll do the same thing with high schools, which are where they know the racial composition,” he continued. “Now, the Supreme Court made pretty clear that that’s not appropriate either.”
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The court’s landmark decision stemmed from lawsuits against two of the country’s most prestigious private and public universities: Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.
Both schools claimed their admissions standards have a larger societal goal, one endorsed for decades by the courts: to promote a robust, intellectually diverse campus for future leaders.
But a student group of Asian Americans sued the schools, saying that their admissions criteria discriminated with a “racial penalty,” holding them to a selectively higher standard than many Black and Hispanic students.”
In the 6-3 decision, the court rejected the arguments of the universities and said the use of race as a factor in college admissions is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Fox News’ Brianna Herlihy, Hanna Panreck and Gabriel Hays contributed to this report
