Free College For All. Now.
On affirmative action, and other Supreme Court rulings.
Real quick up top: you can now sign up for my summer course on plastics! This course is worth actual college credit and will teach you everything you need to know about how plastics are made, what makes them unrecyclable, and what we can do about it. You don’t even need to be a current Five College student to take it! Learn more about how to enroll here and check out the course syllabus on my website. Thanks!
Affirmative action is dead. What now?
Pride Month 2023 ended pretty brutally with Supreme Court rulings on everything from businesses being allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people and Indigenous communities remaining deprived of water. It’s not all bad news; the Indigenous Child Welfare Act was upheld and the court sided with Black voters in Alabama by rejecting a redistricting that would have suppressed their votes even more. Still, it’s hard to not see how the 6-3 conservative majority in the Court, with 3 of those members being appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, is very, very bad, to the point where many are (rightfully) questioning the system by which 9 unelected people can decide the fate of millions.
Most presciently for my own profession in STEM education are (1) the cancellation of Biden’s student loan debt relief plan and (2) the the end of affirmative action. You surely don’t need me to tell you that these will hurt the American public, but let’s break down exactly why this matters and how it connects to everything else conservatives have been doing in this country.
Affirmative Action was the mechanism by which historically-excluded and marginalized groups have gained access to higher education, especially for women and people of color. Higher education has always been predominantly white and male—it was designed that way from the ground up—so the rule was meant to put its finger on the scales to provide a small counterweight against centuries of systemic injustice.
The field of science, particularly biology, is guilty for some of this injustice. In the earliest days of modern science, racists practiced phrenology to “determine” that women’s brains and Black people’s brains were smaller, and thus these groups are more suited to domestic labor or field labor (respectively, or both for Black women). Standardized tests such as the SAT and IQ score are merely the latest iteration of this method of bias, having been invented by eugenicists as a means to rank certain classes of people as having lower intelligence. To this day, the SAT is used to assess student learning and determine who gets into college. This is to say nothing of the economic privileges that are distributed across racial lines on the level of individuals (the ability to hire private tutors, the ability to do extracurricular activities because you don’t have to work, or having parents that went to the college you apply for) and the systemic (your school district being well-funded enough to have AP or Early College Experience classes). Make no mistake: the gutting of affirmative action will have a negative effect on the American public that will last generations and will take generations to fix.
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When discussing why marginalized groups should get an extra helping hand when it comes to college admittance, people usually resort to extrinsic arguments: the Black maternal death rate is four times higher than white women, therefore we should do everything we can do ensure more Black women doctors, that sort of thing. Even I myself have shared my belief that trans people make better scientists and engineers on this very newsletter. These are arguments that should be made, although I resent that we need to make them: Black girls shouldn’t need to have special, magical properties to justify their belonging in STEM fields. Black girls belong as doctors, scientists, and engineers simply because they’re a type of person that exists. (In fact, the notion of “Black girl magic” is one of rich internal discussion in the Black community.) The simple fact that Black women make up only 3% of all doctors should be enough for us to pump the gas on outreach events, in-school support systems, scholarships, grant funding, and yes, affirmative action, in order to increase the enrollment, admission, and support of Black women in the medical field (and all other fields). The fact that diverse healthcare workforces are scientifically proven to be better for both patients and workers is just the cherry on top.
But, no, apparently Black women being educated is “dangerous”. That is the precise word that the Supreme court used when they compared affirmative action to segregation and bans on interracial marriage. Elizabeth Booker Houston, a Black lawyer, broke it down eloquently here:
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To be fair; they’re correct: more women and people of color being educated is indeed a threat to the current power structure, in more ways than one. Widespread education means women will have less economic dependence on men. Widespread education means that people of color will build their own institutions. Widespread education means that people of all backgrounds are more likely to collectively bargain for better working conditions. Widespread education means more revolutionaries and fewer people being complacent under the boot of capitalism. I just happen to think that these are good things, meanwhile conservatives are terrified by this prospect.
One detail that shouldn’t be overlooked when discussing the conservative agenda is that the end to affirmative action will not apply to military academies. Now, the connection between education and the military industrial complex is nothing new; involvement in the military is often the only means by which marginalized peoples can access higher education, housing, and healthcare. However, the fact that the new Supreme Court ruling does not apply to the pipeline of people of color into the military means that more people of color will be sent to die. I would say “sent to die for their country”, but I don’t believe those who die in wars die for anything other than the benefit of the war-profiteering ghouls who run our country; it’s most accurate to say that they’re killed by the state.
None of this is shocking if you’ve been paying attention to what Republicans have been doing for decades. Republicans have declared war on public education, mainly for the reasons stated above, using any excuse they can to defund public libraries, fund charter schools, attack science, and in certain hardcore Christian sects, promote homeschooling.
Conservatives want all women to be uneducated so they can be barefoot, pregnant, and reliant on their husbands. Conservatives want all people of color to be uneducated so they can remain a low-cost labor force, either in lower-wage jobs or in the prison industrial complex. Conservatives want everyone, in fact, to stay uneducated so that they can maintain the current power structure; it just so happens that when Black women have power, they usually use it to liberate everyone else (source: all of American history).
The Supreme Court is merely one of the tools that conservatives are using to enact their goals. Any sense that these nine unelected people exist to serve the best interests of the American public has been thoroughly shattered, if it wasn’t already last year with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. If you still need convincing as to how undemocratic our current legal system is, the case that ultimately resulted in the ruling that LGBTQ+ people can be turned away by private businesses may very well be based on a lie. The case is based on a conservative Christian web designer Lorie Smith who claimed to get a request to design a wedding website for “Stewart and Mike”, a gay couple. But according to recent reporting by Melissa Gira Grant, the Stewart in question is not only a web designer himself, but also a straight man with a wife and kids, and had no knowledge of his involvement in the case until being asked about it. The other theoretical gay man, Mike, is someone who is for sure 100% fabricated; nobody can identify who he actually is. This would mean that the gay couple whose case made it all the way to the Supreme Court never even existed. It’s worth noting that Smith’s lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, is from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the same far-right Christian National group responsible for the recent anti-LGBTQ+ bills and anti-abortion bills, who I covered in a paid post last March. In plain English, the ADF was able to successfully pay for a non-existent discrimination case to be heard by the Supreme Court, and now all gay people can be denied services by businesses in America.
Who Will Save The Trans Community?
This week I’ll be responding to “2600 pages of hate”. I’ll put the story right up front for the non-paying members, since it’s important. The Mother Jones article by Madison Pauly The leaked emails, published by maia arson crimew
I’d say this is a new low for the Court, and that it sets a dangerous precedent for cases not even having to be real for them to be heard, but this is the same court that accepts lavish vacations and (to truly bring things full-circle) tuition money from conservative lobbyists, so the bar is in Hell.
So, what do we do now?
It is imperative that we work to make education free and accessible for all. We can start by offering free tuition to Indigenous people; it’s their land anyway, and the University of Arizona already does it, so why not? While the first beneficiaries of free education should not be white cis men from wealthy backgrounds, these students can afford to go to private schools anyway, so why not admit at least one class consisting of 100% first-generation students and non-white students to make up for generations of injustice? Also, for those who have already passed through college, we can cancel all existing student loan debt and make up the costs by taxing the rich and ballooning our country’s education spending. Oh, and of course, we should abolish the Supreme Court.
Conservatives spent decades working to take away our rights, so why not be as bold and ambitious as possible? No incremental change will fix this system, because it’s working exactly as intended. Our country should value education at least as much as it values war profiteering.
I dream of a day, generations from now, when the Supreme Court is a distant memory, when the existence of an entity known as “America” is merely a cautionary tale about greed and bigotry, whispered to children by their elders, neither of them carrying the pain the true extent of the horrors we’re currently living through, because that trauma has already been healed. The horrors, after all, are merely human made; it does not have to be this way.
Let’s do everything in our power to liberate each other.
Currently Reading
A wonderful piece on how petrochemical corporations control governments abroad.
A must-read on trans legend Miss Major’s current project, Tilifi (“Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is”).
A scorching op-ed about using ChatGPT to do your job.
Anti-capitalist resources from my TikTok friend and anthropology PhD student Hillary Agro.
Watch History
Another Lily Alexandre banger on the search for a “cause” of transness (related: my piece “Stop Looking For The Trans Brain”).
A deep dive by Fab Socialism on Hello Fresh and their working conditions.
A detailed overview by Cheyenne Lin on why women become conservatives despise the fact that it’s not in their best interest (related: by piece on ContraPoints’ latest video essay).
A light-hearted history lesson from Dr. Erica Brozovsky on how queer people invent their own languages.
An inside look by artist Dev Lemons into the world of live music, including how opening acts often lose money by touring and how even world-renowned headliners are being crushed by the Ticketmaster monopoly.
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
My top 5 albums of 2023 so far:
My Soft Machine by Arlo Parks
The Age of Pleasure by Janelle Monae
That! Feels Good! by Jessie Ware
the record by boygenius
Princess Forever by Dreamer Isioma
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna