All posts tagged "Affirmative Action"

The Justice Department is invoking a landmark civil rights law as it walks back a lawsuit seeking to dismantle a state's affirmative action hiring policy.

In a memorandum filed on Tuesday, the DOJ asked a three-judge panel for leave to amend its complaint in a lawsuit it first brought against the state on January 14.

The suit accuses Minnesota of maintaining a "race- and sex-based affirmative action policy" for its state civil service that amounts to a "pattern or practice" violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the very statute written to bar discrimination in employment....

The legal strategist who created the group that toppled affirmative action at academic institutions is reportedly looking to his next target at the Supreme Court.

Edward Blum, who first challenged affirmative action before the country's top court in 2012, founded Students for Fair Admissions, which prevailed against Harvard and the University of Carolina, according to the New York Times. Blum now has his sights set on corporate America, according to an interview with the Times.

"Now, with a legal victory in hand, Mr. Blum is thinking about what’s next in his work to remove the consideration of race from other parts of American life and law," according to the article published on Saturday. "In a wide-ranging discussion, he told me about how he’ll be watching to make sure elite institutions of higher learning abide by the court’s recent decision, and why he thinks corporate America will be facing scrutiny next."...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an enthusiastic participant in the majority ruling from Chief Justice John Roberts invalidating race-based affirmative action programs this week. He has written various attacks on the practice in other opinions over the years, writing in 2013, “The worst forms of racial discrimination in this Nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities.”

He was saying something different in 1983, noted The Washington Post.

"Clarence Thomas told staffers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that 'God only knows where I would be today' if not for the legal principles of equal employment opportunity measures such as affirmative action that are 'critical to minorities and women in this society,'" wrote Timothy Bella. "'These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years,' Thomas, then the EEOC chairman, said in 1983. His comments were later cited in outlets including The Washington Post, the New York Times and Newsweek."...

We can expect a "wave of litigation" stemming from people wrongly attempting to apply the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action to various situations, according to Neal Katyal, who said we can also expect affirmative action to continue at universities despite the ruling.

In a wide-ranging interview on MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Katyal suggested that the ruling striking down universities' use of affirmative action policies will be misapplied to corporate life and that the decision actually leaves the door open for affirmative actions policies that are well written.

"I think that is a decision that is disappointing, but in some ways, it's more narrow than people expected, because it did leave the door open to well crafted affirmative action plans, plans that focus on an individual's applications, what he or she writes in the essay, focusing on the impact of race," Katyal said. ...

Former news anchor Dan Rather slammed the Supreme Court's decision against affirmative action in university admissions on Thursday in a blistering substack post with Elliot Kirschner.

"We may wish we lived in a society where the color of one’s skin and one’s ethnic and cultural background didn’t matter, where we were solely judged by what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously called the 'content of our character.' But we are not there," wrote Rather and Kirschner. "We’ve improved, we’ve learned, we’ve made progress. But we’re not there. Not nearly."

"The Supreme Court’s ruling today largely banning affirmative action for race in college admissions is based on a fundamental distortion of American reality," they continued. "The court’s majority stipulates that the consideration of race as one of many factors in whom a college admits poses a grave constitutional injustice. To be sure, the tool is an imperfect remedy for centuries of systemic racial hatred, exclusion, and violence. But to measure its worth, we can’t ignore the history that necessitated it. Or the reality of what persists."...

Jennifer Gratz, CEO and founder of XIV Foundation, on Sunday blasted Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor for opposing a recent supreme court ruling which gave states the right to ban Affirmative Action.