Supreme Court decisions could have outsized impact on Black Americans

Black advocates are sounding the alarm on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn affirmative action and President Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan, warning both will disproportionately affect Black families.

Advocates say both student loan forgiveness and affirmative action, which the Supreme Court ruled against in two separate cases this week, are racial justice issues.

Kristin McGuire, executive director for the progressive advocacy organization Young Invincibles, called the decisions “a devastating blow to students of color.”

“Our education system simply does not provide all students with the same opportunities, and it never has,” McGuire said in a statement. “We must be proactive to ensure communities who have been historically and intentionally excluded have pathways to and through higher education. Race-conscious admissions were one effective lever to do just that – but we must find new ways to work toward equity and diversity on our campuses. We cannot afford to give up on the students still dreaming of degrees as a tool to fulfill their own American Dream.”

The conservative-leaning Supreme Court ruled Thursday that race-based admissions systems “fail to comply with the Equal Protection Clause’s twin commands that race may never be used as a ‘negative’ and that it may not operate as a stereotype.” It also said that “it is unclear how a court is supposed to determine” if or how students receive the educational benefits of diversity.

Then on Friday, the court ruled 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority that Biden overstepped his authority with his student loan forgiveness plan.

The NAACP condemned Friday’s ruling, specifically citing the effects it will have on Black Americans.

“It is devastating that the cries of Black Americans continue to fall on deaf ears,” said Wisdom Cole, director of Youth and College for NAACP.

“Students, teachers, parents and politicians have repeatedly demanded relief from the crushing weight of student debt – and this government refuses to listen. We cannot thrive as a nation if we do not close the racial wealth gap,” he continued. “Taking the first step to relieve us from student debt is taking a first step towards true equity in a system that was built against us. We refuse to accept defeat. We refuse to live through a reality where our potential for growth and prosperity is hindered by predatory lenders and passive politicians.”

The organization is now calling on Biden to find other ways to uphold his campaign promise for student loan forgiveness.

Biden to announce new actions on student loans after Supreme Court ruling

Anxiety over the decisions has been brewing since the two cases went before the court last year.

In the case against affirmative action, the conservative-backed group Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), alleging the schools illegally discriminate against Asian American applicants.

Since 1978, schools have used race as an ingredient in selecting their student bodies. The practice follows affirmative action policy, which broadly refers to policies that favor individuals who have been subject to previous discrimination.

Still, race-conscious admissions have routinely provoked pushback, often from white and Asian American students who say it is discriminatory. The case before the court argued Harvard and UNC illegally discriminated against Asian American and white applicants when considering admissions.

READ: Jackson dissent in Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling

Advocates like Satra Taylor, director of higher education and workforce policy and advocacy for Young Invincibles, argue this is an attempt to misconstrue what affirmative action policies accomplish.

Affirmative action, Taylor said, was designed to consider race as only one factor in the application of a candidate.

“It does not mean because you are Black, because you are Latinx or because you are Asian American, you automatically have entered into college,” Taylor said. “Affirmative action was a powerful policy lever in response to the racial inequities within the higher education system. It was a lever to redress the harm in terms of the historical exclusion of historically marginalized communities.”

McGuire added that race-conscious admissions does not mean all other requirements are disregarded in admissions, but rather the school is considering the importance of diversity on campus.

“This by no means that the Black students who are accepted or the Indigenous students who are accepted are not as qualified as their white peers,” McGuire told The Hill. “That’s a misconception that we have to really fight hard against, because it’s not a handout.”

She added, “We’ve had far too many decades, and centuries, of poor policymaking and racist policymaking in order for us so that we weren’t able to kind of build ourselves up as other races were able to do and affirmative action kind of gives us the ability to start to make that foundation for ourselves.”

But even before the court’s decision, nine states had already prohibited the consideration of race in public university admissions, including California and Michigan.

Still, the two states admitted in amicus briefs last year that the effects of ending this practice has seen a drastic decline in minority student admissions. In 2021, the University of California, Berkeley’s freshman class included only 258 Black students and 27 Native American students out of a class of 6,931. The same year, the University of Michigan’s flagship campus in Ann Arbor saw only 4 percent Black student enrollment.

McGuire warned that, with affirmative action overturned, this problem will only become more pronounced.

“Oftentimes, these institutions don’t have policies that really support diversity, equity and inclusion, they are not thinking about Black students who come from poor communities, right, they aren’t thinking about the people who actually need the education the most,” Cole, of the NAACP, told The Hill.

“Affirmative action is really an accountability measure, to ensure that we are really looking at the face of America and ensuring that those young people have access to those institutions.”

But worries are also now growing over what happens if students of color are accepted into higher education institutions and can’t pay for it.

After President Biden announced last August a plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan forgiveness for Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 for others with federal loans, the justices agreed to hear two cases against the plan: one brought by two individual student loan borrowers and another from six Republican attorneys general.

“Student debt is embedded into the fabric of our educational system. It is told to us time and time again for us to get a good paying job, for us to have the opportunity to thrive in America, that we have to get an education to be part of that system,” Cole said.

“But what has happened is that Black folks have disproportionately felt the weight and the impact of student debt, particularly Black women. It is expensive to be an educated Black woman in America today.”

Altogether, women hold nearly two-thirds of the U.S. student debt, or nearly $929 billion, according to the American Association of University Women. While white women graduate owing almost $22,000 in student debt, Black women graduate with an average of $37,558 in student debt.

“Black women are going to school and taking out loans to finance their education and then we have what I like to call an imperfect storm: Black women enter the workforce, they make less than their white female counterparts, and then even less than their white male counterparts,” McGuire said. “In fact, a Black woman with a bachelor’s degree makes less than a white man with some college or no degree on average.”

The student loan debt, compounded by wage discrimination, affects not only their ability to pay off the loans but also their ability to buy homes, build discretionary wealth and, in effect, reduce the racial wealth gap.

But arguments against student loan forgiveness have ranged from the overall cost to the government — more than $400 billion over the next 30 years — to the harm it would cause taxpayers and the likelihood of higher inflation. For others, like the pair of students who brought one of the two cases involving student debt relief to the Supreme Court, the argument was simpler: The plaintiffs say student loan forgiveness is unfair.

Ultimately, the court ruled against the students in that case. However, in the second case brought by the six Republican attorneys general, the court ruled against the Biden administration, saying that at least Missouri had legal standing in its challenge to the program.

READ: Kagan’s dissent in Biden v. Nebraska student loan forgiveness case

Cole argued that the question of fairness should be looked at through the lens of the nation’s history of oppression.

“When folks ask that question of fairness, we have to recognize that life has not been fair for many of us,” Cole said. “There are decades of oppression that the Black community has faced. There are ways in which we have been kept out of institutional powers systematically. We have to recognize that this is a time to put people above profits, a time for us to ensure that we are creating more opportunities to really achieve equity.”

“The people who have access to higher education, the people who are able to pay their way through higher education, talks about who has access to these jobs of power for our future,” Cole added. “All of it is connected, all of it is one and all of it is strategic enough to understand that if we are not allowing those who are most marginalized communities access to these spaces, they will not be put into those positions of power.”

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