Transcript
Into America
Ripples of Affirmative Inaction in California
Archival Recording: Major breaking news out of the Supreme Court. In a blockbuster opinion, the court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions. That means that universities can no longer consider race when looking at applications.
Archival Recording: And that ruling overturned almost 50 years of precedent. Now, universities and colleges are scrambling to revisit and revise their existing practices and policies.
Trymaine Lee: When the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in schools late last month, the ruling joined a growing list of decisions that for many have felt disappointing, but not totally surprising. The court’s six justice conservative majority has forged ahead, overturning major longstanding precedents like access to abortion, voting rights and protections for LGBTQ people.
Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion with the majority called affirmative action policies rudderless, and wrote that they, quote, “fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to serve on the court, struck back writing that namely race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Affirmative action began in the 60s in a series of executive actions by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. They mandated that employers on federally funded projects take affirmative action, to hire without bias and discrimination as a way of remedying some of the systemic racial ills of the past. Elite universities soon picked up the practice in an effort to diversify their student bodies, and black enrollment in these schools began the climb.
But then in the mid-70s, a white man named Allan Bakke sued the University of California System for twice rejecting his application to the medical school at UC Davis. He claimed he should have been accepted and the only reason he wasn’t was because the school reserved 16 spots for, quote/unquote, “minority students.” The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1978, that affirmative action through racial quotas, like the one UC Davis was using, were unconstitutional.
They also forced the school to accept Bakke as a student. But the decision did something else, too. The majority opinion said that while schools couldn’t use racial quotas, they could use race as one factor in the admissions process so long as it wasn’t the deciding factor. This precedent stood for 40 years, weathering multiple legal challenges.
Archival Recording: The issue of affirmative action in college admissions is back.
Archival Recording: The court has reaffirmed in no uncertain terms, the right of institutions to take race into account in admissions.
Archival Recording: Affirmative action has worked very, very well in colleges and universities in this country for the last 25 years since the Bakke decision back in 1978.
Archival Recording: The school says students learn better when there’s diversity on campus and within racial groups, but opponents say that’s too vague to justify making admissions choices based on race.
Lee: Then in 2019, conservative activist, Edward Blum, who had unsuccessfully brought an anti-affirmative action case to the Supreme Court in 2015, hatched a new strategy. This time, instead of using white students as plaintiffs, Blum gathered a group of Asian students who had been rejected from Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and helped them sue the schools.
They claimed the schools’ admission process discriminated against Asian applicants. Harvard and UNC initially won their cases and beat back the appeals. But then last fall, the cases made their way to the Supreme Court where they were combined.
Archival Recording: We’ll hear argument next in case 2011-99, students for fair admissions versus the president and fellows of Harvard College.
Lee: Harvard argued that without affirmative action, the school’s racial diversity would all but dry up.
Archival Recording: The racial diversity of the matriculating class would go down. The representation of African Americans, if you just stopped considering race, would go from 14 to 6%.
Lee: But the conservatives on the court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, rejected that argument.
John Roberts: Okay, so we’re talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.
Seth Waxman: Race in some, for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinant factor just as being the, you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.
Roberts: Yeah. We did not fight a civil war about oboe players. We did fight a civil war to eliminate racial discrimination.
Lee: Roberts would go on to write the majority opinion that deemed affirmative action unconstitutional. Conservatives cheered the decision.
Archival Recording: Overturning affirmative action.
Archival Recording: Look, we want to live in a colorblind society.
Archival Recording: This is an amazing ruling.
Archival Recording: And really gratified the Supreme Court rule 6 to 3.
Archival Recording: Being judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
Archival Recording: Not in the color of your skin, but the content of your character.
Archival Recording: You may not make these decisions on the basis of race.
Archival Recording: People are going to get mad at Clarence Thomas. I found his opinion to be magisterial. I’m ecstatic.
Archival Recording: This is a good day for America, honestly.
Archival Recording: This is what we’ve been fighting for, for 30 plus years now.
Lee: But President Joe Biden painted it as a dark day in American history.
Joe Biden: You know, I know today’s court decision is a severe disappointment to so many people, including me, but we cannot let the decision be a permanent setback for the country.
Lee: In California, Governor Gavin Newsom echoed that sentiment.
Gavin Newsom: It only reinforced my anxiety and concern about the world we’re living in and the disparities that persist in this country.
Lee: But California has actually been through this before.
Archival Recording: As it relates to ending affirmative action, which in the state of California will not have a disproportionate impact since that’s been established under Prop 209 in 1996.
Lee: Twenty-seven years ago, California voters passed Proposition 209, which banned race-based affirmative action in any public institution. The real target of Prop 209 was the University of California System, and in particular, UC Berkeley and UCLA, two of the top colleges in the nation. Berkeley and UCLA, both use race as part of the admissions process. And in the mid-90s, the incoming freshman class at both schools was between six and a half and 7% black, which roughly mirrored the state’s black population at the time. By 2022, that number at UC Berkeley had dropped by more than half, to 3%.
Archival Recording: I know like the Supreme Court just knocked it down for the whole country, but in my little bubble, it was knocked down 25 years ago.
Archival Recording: You fast forward from who may have been an undergraduate and going into medical school in the late 90s and who would’ve been 20 years into their careers by the time we got to 2020. Small things like that have a big ripple effect when you look decades down the road.
Archival Recording: The impact that had on black and brown communities was profound. For those that are wondering what’s going to happen in their states, they’d only have to look to California to know exactly what’s going to happen.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee and this is “Into America.” Today, we look at what a future without affirmative action could hold through the story of what happened to UC Berkeley after Prop 209. Through conversations with professors and students, we get the history of affirmative action at UC schools, what happened during the campaign abandoned and why the loss of affirmative action at elite colleges matters.
Tell me about the wall.
Quame Love: Aw, man. Oh, you know about the wall, huh?
Lee: I heard about the wall, but I want to hear from your mouth.
Love: So the wall was a natural place that no one introduced us to it. No one said, hey, that’s how it was.
Lee: Our, when Quame Love was an undergrad at UC Berkeley in the late 80s and the early 90s, there was one place where he knew he could always find his people.
Love: The wall was like this small wall of concrete, just tall enough that you can sit down on, in front of what they called the Golden Bear’s layer. And it sat right in the middle of Lower Sproul, which is a thorough way. So you see any and everybody walking through here, right?
Lee: Yeah.
Love: And man, I would sit on that wall and there, y’all, missed quite a few classes because it would be intoxicating for me. And all the sisters and all these cool folks. Come y’all. What up Quame? Yo, what? And so, yeah. And then the fraternities and sororities would step, there was a little, an area that was clear, right between where the wall was and then where the Golden Bear was, where you would get your food. And every Friday that’s where they would step. So that was our area.
Lee: Quame first stepped onto the Cal campus in 1988. He was born in Brooklyn, raised in North Carolina and then spent the last three years of high school in Los Angeles. His school, Crenshaw High had a rough reputation, but that didn’t stop him from hitting the books.
What kind of student were you when you were coming up just as a young boy, what kind of student were you?
Love: Oh man. I was always a cool nerd. I was always fascinated with learning. I loved the classroom. So, always a great student. Yeah.
Lee: Quame always knew he was destined for college. His mom had graduated from Hampton University, so he also wanted to go to an HBCU. Plus, he had always gone to predominantly black schools.
Love: All I knew was black culture. All I knew was black people. And by my senior year, Howard University was and still is my dream school. So, that was the black Harvard for us, but I couldn’t afford it. So, Berkeley became the next best option, believe it or not.
Lee: As a public university, Berkeley was and still is much cheaper than most private colleges. And when Quame got to the Cal campus, sight unseen, it definitely wasn’t Howard, but it was closer to his dream school than he could have ever imagined.
Love: I was surrounded by all these black people because Clark Kerr was the dorm where a lot of the athletes stayed. And none of us knew that we were part of like a gold and a historical admission of African-American students that year, you know. We were the second highest incoming class of African-American freshman in the history of UC Berkeley. But at that time we, you know, we didn’t know it.
Lee: In 1988 Quame’s freshman class was nearly 11% black. It’s not a stellar number, but it was higher than a black population in California and it was enough for Quame to feel wrapped in a sense of blackness.
Love: We started formulating this crew around cats who was into hip hop. And man, it was like by a little over 40 of us by the end of that freshman year.
Lee: Wow.
Love: And that’s just in a crew.
“Three Feet High and Rising” by De La Soul come out, my first semester, and I remember buying the record and then having to go record it to put it on a cassette. I’m just listening to that over, I’m like, how are they rhyming over these beats? It was blowing my mind. And everybody’s talking about knowledge and pro blackness. And everything is beautiful. I’m learning all these big words from listening to the music, and that’s how me and my crew bonded.
Lee: So you have this kind of melting pot of people coming from all over the place, young black people.
Love: Yeah.
Lee: Who are finding and developing and creating community. You have the music that is reinforcing this sense of self that is strong and beautiful, right?
Love: Yeah.
Lee: Culturally rich.
Love: Yeah.
Lee: Talk to us about then going into these African American studies classes. Oh, I can only imagine the energy that’s bubbling up and fusing together.
Love: I was a kid in the candy store, Trymaine. I was a kid in the candy store. So, now this is my first time getting this type of information. And my first class, my freshman year, it was African American Studies 4A. It was about Africa and African history, and probably about 200 students, all black in this lecture course by Professor Sheila Johnson. Never forget.
And man, I remember falling in love in that class 20 times over. I mean, these sisters are embracing me for being smart, professors giving me all of this knowledge that’s making me feel great about myself. Every time I stepped in my African American studies class, you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t at Howard. You couldn’t tell me it. I can’t get you the feel. It was incredible. It was incredible.
Lee: Wow.
But UC Berkeley was still very much a white school and the white students would not let Quame and his friends forget it.
Love: We were getting ridiculed and kind of poked at a lot. And all the black students were, you were teased and say, oh, you’re here on affirmative action. I mean, we’d be in class and people would be, oh man, I stole his affirmative action. And I’m not even exaggerating. Now, I knew that I was an affirmative action student. I had a 750 on my SAT, which I knew was extremely low. I took it twice and that was my highest. And I had a 3.4 GPA, which was high for Crenshaw, but still extremely low for Cal. So, I was very grateful. For me, affirmative action was an opportunity and I took advantage of it. I knew I was there on an opportunity.
Lee: Quame made the most of that opportunity. He graduated from Cal in 1992 after teaching high school and getting his masters from Columbia Teachers College in New York. He ended up coming back to Berkeley this time for a job.
Love: I was the undergraduate advisor, 1995 in African American studies. And so now when I get back on Cal’s campus, I was the man. Simple and plain, I was the man.
Lee: Wow.
Donna Collins: Quame was really important. He was everything that we all kind of aspired to be, you know. We wanted to be cool. We wanted to be black and down with our culture. And we also wanted to be smart and successful and like achieving in whatever field that we were passionate about, that we were trying for.
Lee: Donna Collins was a student at the time.
Collins: He’s always had that focus and always kept it in the forefront of conversation is like, where are black people at? And like, we were important to him. Like we felt like every single one of us was important to him.
Lee: The number of black students had dipped a little by the time Donna was at Cal, but there was still a strong black presence. She sat on the wall, she moved in a huge circle of black friends, and that community was crucial to her success in college.
Collins: We were forming our identities. We were building our confidence. You know, we were learning things in school, but we needed that social connection, you know, to kind of give us something to stand on. And you take that with you. And then you go into those lecture halls and you’re like, you know what? I might be the only black person in this hundred, 200, 300 person lecture hall, but that’s okay because I know where to go to like find my people.
Le: But in 1996, something was coming to threaten all of that.
Archival Recording: There’s a controversial ballot measure to end preference for minorities and women. Here’s NBC’s Dan De Luce.
Archival Recording: Stop the prop —
Dan De Luce: On one side, there are people like these college students who oppose Proposition 209, the measure that would end affirmative action in California.
Lee: Prop 209 was the brainchild of Ward Connerly, a conservative black businessman who sat on the UC Board of Regents. The ballot measure would ban affirmative action in public education, public employment and public contracting. But the true aim was ending race based admissions practices at Cal and UCLA.
Archival Recording: Ward Connerly with backing from the Republican Party is point man in the campaign to end affirmative action.
Archival Recording: When you give a preference to one American because of the color of his or her skin or because of their national ancestry, that is discrimination.
Love: You know, there was this talks like, oh man, there’s this brother named Ward Connerly and he’s trying to, you know, take away affirmative action and any type of special admissions for black students and leveling the playing ground and he says, it’s unfair. And so, you know, that’s what we were hearing.
Collins: In the lead up to that election year. It was hot on campus. It was huge. There was a momentum, a huge swell leading right up to election day.
Love: UC Berkeley is just historically known for protests and free speech and, you know, letting your thoughts be known. So there was a lot of different groups. A lot of the professors were speaking out.
Collins: One of the big moments for me that was really like, kind of took my breath away was when we were in Sproul Plaza, there was a mic set up. People were taking turns. People had banners and signs and I turned around and I looked, and there was a network news van that had driven up onto campus and had the big like satellite looking thing on the top.
I just felt like my chest got big. Like my body like felt like a balloon, like, oh, you know, like this could make a difference, you know. We really are getting our voice out. People are going to hear. And of course people are going to understand. They’re absolutely going to see how wrong this is, how wrong the UC regents are and they’re going to get it. They’re for sure going to get it.
Lee: The people most certainly did not get it.
Archival Recording: One more note about other ballot questions around the country yesterday, California voters passed a controversial Proposition 209, that strikes down preferences for minorities and women in virtually all state programs, affirmative action.
Lee: After a bitter fight, Prop 209 passed with 55% of the vote. Did Donna, the loss, but personal?
Collins: It makes me emotional to think about it. It made me realize how many people didn’t get it, didn’t care. And maybe even actually wanted to see black and brown students stay down, stay on the bottom, stay out of education, stay in poverty. That was really eye-opening. It was important because it was real. It was really real. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what it was. And it’s important to see what things are because then you know what you’re up against really.
Lee: At a town hall meeting, after the proposition passed, Quame remembers black professors speaking out, warning what was going to happen to the black community on campus and beyond. Quame had another feeling. If white Californians didn’t want people like him at the school, then maybe black scholars should carve their own path.
Love: So I remember actually speaking out at this town hall saying, I know I’m supposed to be for affirmative action. It benefited me, but it might not be a bad thing. Maybe it’ll force us to attend these black colleges. Like, you know, maybe we can get our stuff together. They’ve already voted. This is their school. And so I’m like, hey, if we don’t have our own institutions, we can’t say nothing. So, hey, since we got some schools, let’s support them.
Lee: Right.
Love: And that was my mindset at that time.
Lee: But that’s not what ended up happening. When we come back, UC Berkeley after 209 when into effect and why it matters.
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Lee: By 1996, conservative opponents to affirmative action has succeeded in a 20-year battle of reframing what affirmative action was and what his benefits were.
Dr. Eddie Cole is the professor of education and history at UCLA. He says Prop 209 victory was part of a long campaign to change how affirmative action was perceived, especially by white people.
Eddie Cole: Affirmative action was designed to address the legacy of racism in the United States. By the time the Supreme Court hears the Bakke case in 1978, the talking point shifts away from addressing the legacy of racism to the benefits of diversity on predominantly white college campuses. That’s a big difference. People in California are thinking in terms of diversity and looking at California, they’re sort of day to day activities as a highly racially diverse state.
So, why vote for affirmative action in a state like that when all of a sudden you see different racial representation in sort of state level and local level elected officials, and you see that sort of representation on your college campuses. It’s no surprise to me in the 1990s that by the time that misunderstanding is sort of in public conversation, that people voted against it.
Lee: So 209 passes and what happens to UCLA and UC Berkeley in particular?
Cole: Well, those campuses are highly selective, had always been highly sought after and get so many applications even as public universities. And so when you can no longer consider race in who you’re accepting, you start looking at the usual measures that actually lean toward benefiting well to do white residents, right? So when you consider standardized test scores like the SAT and ACT, right, when you consider AP courses that students come in loaded with these weighted GPAs, those offerings are always skewed.
So much data for decades have always showed that those skewed to a more affluent white areas. And so at places like Berkeley, UCLA, you see the number of black students decline significantly, right. At UCLA moving from roughly 8% of the incoming classes down to about 3% of the incoming classes.
Lee: Quame watched as black enrollment at UC Berkeley faced a similar drop when Prop 209 went to effect in 1998.
Love: So, the incoming class of African-American freshmen in 1990, 1997 was 257. The incoming class in 1998 was 126.
Lee: Wow. And is this being applauded somehow? Like, yeah, this is what we wanted.
Love: Yeah.
Lee: I mean, yeah.
Love: Yeah.
Lee: That’s how it —
Love: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lee: That sounds crazy.
Love: Which I couldn’t understand or believe, but yeah, there were people on the campus and a lot of people who were like good.
Lee: Exhaling, whew, finally.
Love: Yes.
Lee: The wall was getting a little too much for us. All this hibbity bee bop going on and —
Love: Yeah.
Lee: As the number of black students dwindled, Quame remained one of the go-to black advisors on campus, especially for the transfer students and athletes he worked most closely with. He also started teaching classes on hip hop, black relationships and spirituality. For a while, his classes were still filled with black students.
Love: And my time as a teacher from 2005 to 2020 in the classroom changed tremendously over that time in terms of like this electricity in the classroom, this perspective to where people used to be debating. We’d have really rich discussions and like almost arguments, like, no (inaudible). And that’s actually good on a college campus, especially one like Berkeley to where, you know, I’m begging people, all right, what are your thoughts? Come on, somebody. And then now I’m playing devil’s advocate and a lot of times they’re not even really challenging me.
Lee: Wow. And then you point a direct line back to Prop 209.
Love: No, absolutely. No, there’s no doubt about it.
Kyndall Dowell: I remember the first thing older students were telling us when we got there was we really got to stay, you know, like kind of a thing. The hardest thing about Berkeley is making it through
Lee: Kyndall Dowell started at Cal as a freshman in 2018. She took a break for a little bit, but is now about to start her final semester. Kyndall’s income class was just 3% black. She never got the chance to experience the community that Quame and Donna had, but she still had to face people constantly questioning her right to be there.
Dowell: My freshman year, like, roommate thought that I came off affirmative action or felt like, you know, maybe I was an athlete or something, but didn’t really immediately considered my merit.
Lee: Much of Kindle’s time at Cal has been marked by activism like protesting police brutality on campus and pushing the school’s leaders to do more for black students. She also helped to lead the charge for a ballot measure in 2020 that was supposed to repeal Prop 209, but failed on election day. The loss was disappointing to Kyndall who can only imagine what her experience at Berkeley would’ve been without 209.
Dowell: I believe that I would’ve had a happier time at Cal, you know. I think that so much of my undergraduate experience has been protesting. You know, there’s something that we used to say all the time. Black students don’t have the luxury. It’s just be students.
Lee: Now, with the Supreme Court ruling that all race based affirmative action is unconstitutional, Dr. Cole says Kyndall’s experience will become even more common.
Cole: I think we’re going to see a dramatic impact. In fact, in some states, the way state politics work, we might see an even more damning impact on black students on some campuses, even more dramatic than we saw when it comes to California in the 1990s. And that’s something that we should be concerned about.
Lee: And so on one hand, different schools will be affected in different ways because it sounds like, okay, it’s done every college across this country is going to be, have a harder time recruiting black students, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Cole: No, not at all. And I always tell people that the Supreme Court decision really directly impacts maybe three, the four dozen institutions, but it also has, again, that sort of ripple effect, that’s going to impact three or 4,000 institutions within the United States because that’s how many degree granting institutions of higher education actually exist in the United States. We spend a lot of time talking about Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Berkeley, UCLA, but there are thousands of others that won’t struggle to recruit black students, right?
Now, the important point is the decision around affirmative action actually falls within a multi-point attack on higher education. And that’s what we have to pay attention to because at the same time, there are efforts to dismantle and underfund diversity equity and inclusion offices, their efforts to dismantle the faculty tenure system. There’s an ongoing systemic underfunding, historically black colleges as well because you can’t all of a sudden say, can’t consider race. We’re going to turn away black students from highly selective institutions while also not better funding historically black colleges that have long admitted black students.
Lee: But just as we can look to the UC schools for what could happen, we can also look to one of them in particular, for some solutions. In 2006, UCLA hit a truly terrible low for incoming black students. The freshman class was just 2% black. In response, the school launched a vibrant outreach effort where alumni, community leaders, and campus reps went directly into black communities to encourage students to apply. By 2022, the number of incoming black freshmen at UCLA had more than doubled, but it’s still just 5%.
Cole: Too often, many selective institutions think applicants will just come to them. But in reality, sometimes you have to go meet people where they are. And I give a lot of people who work in outreach at UCLA, a lot of credit into going into various parts of the state, not just around Los Angeles County, but all up and down the state and telling people who may have from a distance thought UCLA was not the place for them. Actually going into those schools into those community centers and saying, hey, consider UCLA, right?
And matching that effort with saying if admitted or when admitted, here’s what we have to think about in terms of financial aid in supporting students around scholarships and other ways to help people afford to go to a place like UCLA. So, although, you know, I’m critical in terms of is taken far too long for a place like UCLA to get back to mid-1990s numbers, you have to give colleagues across campus a lot of credit for what’s been happening more recently to actually finally get those numbers back to where we were in the mid-90s. Hopefully, it doesn’t take the rest of the nation three decades to figure out what to do with black students.
Lee: The stakes are high. It’s not just about having more diversity at these top schools or even individual students experiences. When elite schools don’t graduate as many black students, we all suffer.
Cole: Really just look at the last three years, right? Especially when you come out of the coronavirus pandemic and what those health disparities reminded us of and how important it is to have black nurses, black doctors, other black specialists studying these issues. And who you fast forward from, who may have been an undergraduate and going into medical school in the late 90s, early 2000s, and who would’ve been 20 years into their careers by the time we got to 2020.
Small things like that have a big ripple effect when you look decades down the road. There are fewer black doctors, fewer black nurses. At a moment where we were in a global pandemic where black people were disproportionately impacted just by the nature of how society has worked around lack of health access.
Lee: Kyndall Dowell is poised to be one of these change makers. She’s applying to law school and she knows that going to Cal matters.
Dowell: As much as I talk about my harsh experiences going through Cal, I have so much privilege behind being able to say that I have a UC Berkeley degree and have no question of where that will take me when I’m far done with Berkeley. And for that I’m grateful, but I also know, especially being the first in my family to go to college of any kind, you know, to actually see it through, you know. The first in my family to pursue or I’ll probably, you know, I make more than my family now. I most likely will make, you know, a whole lot more after I get that law degree, you know, kind of a thing. I can only, you know, hope or wish or imagine that I can set the trend or be able to continue a newer generation for my own future family.
Lee: Quame spent almost three decades working at UC Berkeley. He retired in 2020 in part because of how much the campus had changed. And over the years, he’s had a lot of time to think about the place that affirmative action holds in education.
For a brief moment there before 209, you were saying, you know, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is a little fire under us and we can put their energy into black institutions. How was your opinion on that change? Like from where you sit now, how to view the destruction of affirmative action, not just in California, but now with the news from the Supreme Court, basically ending affirmative action nationally?
Love: Right. So, see, look what we started. You know, look what we started, the voters in California. Look what we did, you know, Ward Connerly, look what you did, you know? So now my, of course, my viewpoint as a father, my son is nine years old. I’m married. So, I look at society and the community much more differently. So now I see what my professors were saying like, no, we can’t let this happen. We got to fight it. Because now my friends I’m in my early 50s, my friends are surgeons, my friends are journalists. They’re educators, they’re presidents of colleges. They’re all these things.
And I’m like, you know, from UC Berkeley, I can reach out to them. I’m going back to that first concept. For me, affirmative action was an opportunity. Let’s go, oh man, somebody’s given me an opportunity. So now there’s this opportunity that has really been stripped from us that we really not needed, but deserved. You know, when you look at the history of the United States and America, I mean, you know, I don’t know how, you know, as a country, we atone for that decision to take away something. And everybody loses out, everyone.
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Lee: When the Supreme Court announced their decisions, the justices read their opinions from the bench, but they don’t make that audio available until the beginning of the next term. So, our friends over at the podcast, “The Beat with Ari Melber” did something special. They had actor, Alfre Woodard, read Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the affirmative action case, all 29 pages of it
Alfre Woodard: With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces colorblindness for all by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.
Lee: You could find the link to the whole thing in our show notes or search for “The Beat with Ari Melber” on your podcast app. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook using the handle @intoamericapod or you can tweet me @trymainelee, my full name. If you love the show, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now.
“Into America” is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I’m Trymaine Lee.
And before we go, I wanted to let you know that you won’t be hearing from us for a bit. Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. I’m just taking some time away to work on a special new reporting project for “Into America” at MSNBC. And I’m really excited to get it done to share with you.
In the meantime, if you start to miss us, why don’t I go back and check out some of our greatest hits like our “Streets Disciples” series on 50 years of hip hop and politics, or my 2020 conversation with Dr. Clarence Jones, one of the writers behind Martin Luther Kings, I have a dream speech, or as the presidential race picks up steam, there’s also our Power of the Black Vote series. The one we reported on ahead of the midterms. We’ll drop a link to those stories in the show notes. And remember, keep your eyes and ears here on this feed for some new stories we know you’ll love. You can catch those in just a few months. See you soon.