Wow.
As the Fourth of July approaches, the liberal media is out there with an appalling reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision prohibiting colleges and universities from judging student applicants by race. It is as if the 1960’s and the civil rights movement never happened. With liberal media turning into the latest version of all those infamous 1960’s segregationists.
As my NewsBusters colleague Curtis Houck has noted:
Naturally, the liberal networks were forlorn with experts, journalists, and pundits blasting, fretting, and seemingly near tears over the “disappointing” and “distressing” ruling that will further force black people to further grapple with the “traumas” of simply existing.
…The takes were flowing on Disney-owned ABC. They brought in Loyola University professor Mitchell Crusto for a brief comment and he made it count by calling the decision “unfortunate” and “a bleak day for equity, diversity, and inclusion, especially for racial minorities,” and the Supreme Court has purposefully placed another obstacle of the many obstacles that they face relative to higher education.
…Contributor Kate Shaw (and wife of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes) cheered the dissenting opinions from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor, focusing on the former’s race-based worldview and bemoaning how ‘the flagship educational institution of a former Confederate state’ in UNC will no longer be able to continue ‘embrac[ing] its obligation to afford genuine equal protection’.
Amazingly, there is not a trace of irony in Shaw not mentioning that the American Left, notably with its flagship Democrat Party, was built by slaveholders and those who believed then - and now - in judging everyone by race. As I have mentioned before in this space, "….race is what the Left has always been about. It is the Left’s go-to, and has been, in this instance, right from the formation of the Democrat Party."
Where to begin with what is a stark liberal media abandonment of history, not to mention turning that history upside down and backwards? As discussed in that earlier column, this is a political movement with two centuries worth of support for judging by race. There were the repeated pro-slavery platforms, the opposition to abolishing slavery, giving blacks due process and the right to vote. Next were the race judging Jim Crow laws, and now identity politics, the son of segregation and grandson of slavery.
Then there’s that famous speech from Dr. Martin Luther King delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
But what is often lost is the rest of Dr. King’s speech that day - in which he echoes exactly what this newest Supreme Court decision banning racial discrimination has said.
Here’s Dr. King:
And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
…We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.
…So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
…And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.
The Supreme Court decision that bars colleges and universities from judging applicants by race bears, albeit in legalese, a striking similarity to Dr. King’s words. Says the Court:
…the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall ‘deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws. Proponents of the Equal Protection Clause described its ‘foundation[al] principle as ‘not permit[ing] any distinctions of law based on race or color.’ Any ‘law which operates on one man’, they maintained, should ‘operate equally upon all.’
Whether it is the Fourteenth Amendment or the historic words of Dr. King, the point is the same: No American should be judged by race. Period.
And yet there is one liberal media figure after another effectively standing up to oppose the Fourteenth Amendment, not to mention the words of Dr. King. Which is to say, they are effectively standing up for racial discrimination.
It is impossible to ignore what former President George W. Bush once called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in all this. The obvious liberal notion underlying all of this is that if you’re black you’re not equal.\Taken in the context of the Left’s horrendous history on judging by race, this negative reaction by the liberal media to the Court’s decision to once and for all eliminate judging one’s college eligibility by race is hardly surprising.
But the Supreme Court, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, is standing strong.
Somewhere Dr. King is smiling.
Happy Fourth of July.
