“The idea of a colorblind society or what they call race neutral society ignores the whole history of this country.” Michael Harriot welcomes educator and fellow podcast host at theGrio Black Podcast Network, Dr. Christina Greer to discuss “race neutral” admissions following The Supreme Court’s decision to effectively outlaw affirmative action. The pair agree the concept of race neutrality is absurd and not realistic and claim that Asian Americans are being used as pawns by conservative Americans. They also discuss the importance of diverse classrooms and point out that eliminating policies meant to level the playing field is rooted in white supremacy.
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Panama Jackson [00:00:00] You are now listening to theGrio’s Black podcast network. Black Culture Amplified.
Michael Harriot [00:00:05] Guys, I’m so happy today, right. I’m ecstatic. So I heard about this country that was race neutral. I’m trying to find a travel agent to see if I could get a ticket. But before I do, I want to welcome you to theGrio Daily, the only podcast that will tell you why there is no such thing as race neutral. You probably heard about this new Supreme Court ruling that knocked down basically affirmative action admissions policies in higher education. Today, to help me kind of work through it and talk about this issue, we invited especially I don’t even know if you could call her a special guest anymore because, like we’ve been on each other’s podcasts, ya’ll know who it is, right? TheGrio’s on Dr. Cristina Greer.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:00:50] So glad to be with you here today, Michael.
Michael Harriot [00:00:53] I wanted to work through this Supreme Court ruling. Harvard versus whiteness. I think that’s the name of it. I’m not sure of the real name, but
Dr. Christina Greer [00:01:02] I think it’s Harvard and USC versus whiteness.
Michael Harriot [00:01:04] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. My mistake. But basically, just to give the listeners a rundown, Asian-American students actually sued two colleges, Harvard and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, basically saying that their affirmative action policies did policies that included race as a factor into admissions was unconstitutional. There were a bunch of dissenters, Clarence Thomas dissenting, saying we live in a race neutral country, basically. If you read the opinion, it basically says that all actions should be toward the goal of a race neutral society and that anything else is unconstitutional. Considering race as a factor in admissions policies is now unconstitutional. So I want to start with you telling me what you expected and how you reacted when you read or heard about the decision.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:02:00] Well, Michael, you know, I’m not surprised. I mean, you know, obviously, folks are running around with their hair on fire. But, you know, to live in America is to know America. And at a certain point in time, you got to stop kind of being hysterical about how she’s going to behave. We know how she’s going to behave. So we know that when Donald Trump appointed these three conservative Supreme Court justices, affirmative action would be on the chopping block. We knew it was going to make its way to the courts. Conservatives have tried to put affirmative action back on the table since 1960. And so it’s just been a slow walk with, you know, all these conservative groups, the Federalist Society. Donald Trump promised his supporters conservative justices for this particular reason. And we know Republicans have paid a lot more to the courts than, paid more attention to the court than Democrats. So here we are as an educator who needs diversity in the classroom of all stripes, right? I need racial and gender and sexuality diversity. I need geographic diversity. I need class diversity for us to have real robust discussions about American politics. And this decision today essentially walks all that back and uses false claims from the 14th Amendment, which we know we needed the 14th Amendment in the first place because Black people weren’t considered equal, a borderline, not even considered human.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:03:11] So we also know that white women have been the prime beneficiaries. And we’ve seen time and time again with these lower level court cases that Asian-Americans are allowing themselves to be used as pawns by conservative whites to essentially make this argument that if Black people are in a place of excellence or elite schools, it’s because your child was denied. We’ve seen people consistently vote against their interests, but for this one, explicitly, they are making the claim that, you know, if you have Black students in elite spaces, it must be because we have taken the spots of people who are more worthy and they helped convince Asian-Americans in these lawsuits that that’s primarily the case, leaving out legacy that will disproportionately affect Asian-Americans, Latinos and Blacks, leaving out other factors that have always benefited whites over everything. I mean, every policy in this country is based on race and it’s based on upholding a level of white supremacy. So when we have policies that have tried to level the playing ground, we’ve seen white people, by and large, consistently try and work against it, because anything that makes things equal, a significant portion of the white population in America sees it as working against them.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:04:18] I call it like the Archie Bunker theory, right? Archie Bunker’s like, you know, is bad enough. Like, you can’t move into my neighborhood. George Jefferson. Right. Because, you know, The Jeffersons and spinoff of of All in the Family. But he’s incensed when George Jefferson works hard and harder than him and then moves out of the neighborhood and gets a better job and a better life. And so this is what we’re seeing play out in this educational space where white people are bad, that we’re even in schools with them. And then when we go on to do great things, it’s because you stole something from me. It’s like, No, we actually just worked hard and you were asleep at the wheel. You had a 400 year head start. I don’t know what to do. I know to tell you if you had a 400 year head start and you’re mad that we’re now somewhat at an equal playing ground in one university here and there.
Michael Harriot [00:04:58] Yeah. So it’s interesting. What’s interesting to me about this ruling is, a few things, one, so the prime beneficiaries of any admissions policy has always been white people. There was a study done a couple of years ago and I actually interviewed and talked to the person who did it, who found that the admissions policies have loopholes. Affirmative action are race based loopholes. Then legacies, athletes, the children of, so basically children of people work there, and then donors. Right. And what he found was the people who benefited from affirmative action, the percentage of people were nowhere near the percentage of people who benefited from those other categories, which disproportionately benefit white people. And what surprised me about his study in our interview was that athletic policies, athletic scholarships disproportionately benefit white people. You know, we like to think of the football and a basketball team, but we forget that there’s like golf scholarships in tennis scholarships and in the rowing scholarship.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:06:05] Don’t forget the varsity blues. The varsity blues, you know, all those rich people getting busted. It’s like so wait rowing? You were getting your kid in at USC and all these other schools under these obscure sports, you know, pretty soon to be pickleball. We know that that’s the case.
Michael Harriot [00:06:18] We can dismiss the notion that some people benefit from loopholes and others don’t. Like that Black people were getting all the loopholes. It was mostly white people. But what the Supreme Court did is knock down the Black loophole and said, oh, the white loopholes are aight. So I think is is wrong to say that the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action. They struck down affirmative action for everybody but white people. Right. And the other thing that is important is the idea that colorblind society or what they call race neutral society. Right. Ignores the whole history of this country. Right. So when you talk about a race neutral society or a colorblind society, you have to intentionally ignore everything before and not just everything before the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act. But you got to intentionally ignore everything before those students got to college, right? So we know that 69% of African-American students attend schools that are majority Black. Right. Because of the way America’s segregated and redlined this country Black. The average Black school district is underfunded by about $1266 less than per student than a majority white school district. So the majority, two out of every three children in America attend a school that is underfunded less than their white counterparts. Right. So you got to ignore that, right? You got to ignore that the admissions policies, the S.A.T. and the AP exams, all of those admissions tests favor white students. They favor them socio economically. They favor them in language. So you got to ignore that. You got to ignore that the resources at schools, right? Not just the monetary resources, but like majority Black schools, literally have fewer books in the library, less technology. You got to ignore all of that. And then when they get to college, you say, oh, we got this race neutral, colorblind society that we supposed to be sticking to. And it is like a dream world that they have constructed, not just because they are ignorant, but because they are intentionally trying to gerrymander Black people out of the system that we pay for and we support.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:08:28] Oh, yeah, we always have. And you know, Michael, I think it’s really important. First of all, I love your mind and I love how your mind works, but I think it’s really important that we focus on the lead up to these collegiate decisions, because as you laid out for us, we are dealing with inequities literally starting at birth, right? I mean, we’re dealing with maternal disparities with Black women. Like, we start there and then we have disparities in housing, which we know that housing and tax bases are linked to schools where one of the few countries that does that. Right. So we are living in neighborhoods that are defunded, underfunded. So we’re going to schools that are underfunded. We know that cities where the vast majority of Black people live have to deal with state houses that are majority white. And so when they see majority Black districts, they are more than excited to defund and underfund those systems. We know that the minute our public school system became majority Black and Latino, by and large we have disinvested in public education because whites want to do either charters or these Catholic Christian schools that they loved, or even homeschooling, which is a new sort of burgeoning way that white people can get money from the federal government and not have their children interact with Black kids specifically and Black and Latino kids more broadly. And then we move through a system where we also have to talk about educators, right?
Dr. Christina Greer [00:09:47] So we push a lot of Black teachers out. We know that there are a lot of Black teachers and Black principals that are dealing with the same levels of racism as everyone else in society. And so they’re being pushed out of educational systems. And we have essentially a lot of Karens in our classrooms that are contributing to the school, to prison pipeline and just disadvantaging our children, by and large, from pre-K all the way through 12th grade. So if we make it to 12th grade to even get to apply to colleges, elite and otherwise, then we’re still dealing with these inequities where white people are trying to legally structure it so that we don’t actually have a fair hand in the game. And so when we do have policy to practices that try to level that out, we’ve seen white folks, by and large, be apoplectic that we would even think that we should be equal. Now, they keep talking about this race neutral, colorblind body as you start it off. Where is it? I’m packing my luggage. I have a new Express suitcase. I’m totally into it. And also quite baffled at white people consistently telling Black people that you’re getting things for free, which we have never received in this country. And we know that the vast majority of social programs and financial benefits have gone and continue to go to white people, which contributes to their generational wealth. So it’s a larger web that we can weave, but we know that people like Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas wanted, just as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, you know, be like little ostriches and put their heads in the sand and pretend that they don’t see the reality of what America is and what she always has been since her foundation.
Michael Harriot [00:11:21] Right. So the only thing with that that I’ll disagree with is that race based policies like don’t even try to fix an inequity. And this is this has always been my point. Right? Let’s say that you have two people, right. And they were running a race. And at the finish line, both of them ran the race in 4.4 seconds. Right. If the Black person ran further, the Black person has actually excelled higher. So when you factor in the school system, when you factor in the lack of resources, when you factor in the fact that there’s a school to prison pipeline and not just a school to prison pipeline, we’d like to call it the school to prison pipeline, but there’s a school to suspension pipeline. There’s a school to remedial courses pipeline. There’s a school to all of the pipelines that white people have instructed. Right. And if somebody makes it through that system and submits an application to one of the best institutions or what they call the best institutions in America, they’re saying you shouldn’t even consider that this person ran further. We arrived at the same finishing tape, but the person who ran faster for a longer distance, you can’t consider that. It’s not preferring Black students. It’s actually looking at the totality of the evidence. Like they’re not the same. The Black students are better. Black students perform better than all the ALDCs that get admitted to college. The legacies that all of the other students, the Black students perform better because they ran a longer race. And what you’re saying is you shouldn’t consider that the Black students are better.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:13:02] No, I, I think that that this is why I love your mind. It’s like that is the succinct and cogent point that we have to remember. If one person ran ten feet to get into college and another person ran, you know, 10,000 feet, we shouldn’t say, well, they both get into college. Good for them. It’s a fundamental difference. But I think, you know, there’s ahistoric nature of this country, and we’ve always been this way. And to have someone like Clarence Thomas upholding this, a historic nature, is so indicative of the ways that white supremacy can work, where you don’t actually have to be white to uphold white supremacy. We see the Asian-American students doing it in their court cases. We see Clarence Thomas doing it in his majority opinion. And we’re going to. The reason why I’m not, you know, running around hysterical, it’s because every gain that we’ve ever gotten in this country is because Black people have worked hard. We are the biggest patriots for this country. We’re the ones who are trying to make her live up to her ideal. But we’ve always seen her have progress and then regress. This is what our grandparents always told us. We saw them make great strides and then they were pushed back. We saw our parents make great strides and their rolled back on our watch. We’ve made great strides in our generation and we’re seeing them roll back. And so it’s somewhat like this fluidity. The fluidity of American democracy that makes it such that I’m accustomed to it, so I’m not hysterical from it. Am I disappointed and angry? Yes. Am I going to rest really quickly so we can continue to organize and strategize and fight? Yes, because I want to make sure that our future generations of Black people don’t have to go through this again as we consistently see policies being rolled back, whether it’s a woman’s right to choose or affirmative action or whatever it may be. And I was just reading Elie Mystal is a friend of theGrio, a friend of your podcast and mine. You know, he wrote a great piece in The Nation, really breaking it down from the 14th Amendment to the present and, you know, talking about the mediocrity of whiteness. And that’s really what’s being upheld here. And what sort of is the real crux of, you know, some of the fear of these policies and these decisions is to make sure that mediocre white people can always feel superior to Black folks in some capacity.
Michael Harriot [00:15:19] So I want to go back real quick. So one thing that you said at the beginning of the podcast, which is really important, right? And when you talked about the diversity in the classroom. Because what the Supreme Court said is that an institution, doesn’t have the ability to construct a learning environment that is most beneficial to the students, right. So if you got all white people from the same background or all people who were lucky enough to have the same socio economic benefits, the same kind of two parent homes that could afford tutoring, to get them to that place where they could get admitted to Harvard, then you’re just going to have a classroom filled with people who all have the same ideas, who all have the same viewpoints. And that’s going to hurt them. And so what I want to ask you is like going into the end of this podcast, what do you think the tangible loss or benefits or like what do you think this ruling means for reality?
Dr. Christina Greer [00:16:19] Well, the reality is in the classroom, Michael, you know, the price tag for university is quite large, and it’s a huge sacrifice for lots of families, regardless of race. I talk to all of my students and they’re thinking about loans. They’re thinking about, you know, the fact that their parents are really making sacrifices to send them to these universities, whether public or private, and some are first generation, and that goes across race and ethnicity as well. And so what is the point of paying this money to sit in a classroom with a bunch of clones and drones where when I throw out a question, everyone says, yes, we all agree. The whole point of college is an intellectual exercise. I’m there as your guide. I have three and a half months to take you on an intellectual journey, to challenge you, to challenge some of your preconceived opinions from how you grew up, from what your parents told you, your grandparents told you. For you to sit shoulder to shoulder next to people who you disagree with, but you learn how to articulate your ideas. You learn how to sort of think through your ideas. You sometimes learn that maybe the idea that you came into college with aren’t really what you believe. It’s what your parents believe. And this is the time for you to have the leisure, to think. It’s a luxury to be able to think and to write. I mean, this is why Black people weren’t allowed to write and learn how to read for so many centuries.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:17:34] So I’m here to help you develop who you are as a person, you know, to really dig deep and really think about your ideas and your values and your morals and who you want to be to contribute to society, whether it’s just making money, but like making money for what and for whom. And so to sit there next to someone who agrees with everything you agree with, what’s the point of that? You got to start at your kitchen table and just hang out with your friends in the backyard. This is what the money is for. When people are like, What’s the point of a liberal arts education? A liberal arts education is for me to essentially lay out a buffet for you to sample things. Semester after semester. You can try things on and you realize, I like this. I don’t like that I thought this, but maybe I don’t think that. And then you come to realize that, like, you’re a much more complicated person than you thought. You have a lot more learning to do. I’m trying to actually make lifelong learners, you know, not just for the grade, but for the sake of learning. You’re interested because life is interesting and you want to be around other distinct people to constantly have those challenges. Right? I’m sure if we just sat here for 3 hours, we’d probably disagree on a host of things. Listen, I think about our podcast brother, Touré. He and I could sit there for hours and disagree, and it’s fantastic because at the root, sometimes we agree, but the journey is different. Or sometimes at the root we fundamentally disagree, but our journey, we end up in the same place. That’s the whole point of a college education and giving people that foundation to be able to disagree on certain ideas and really figure out your values. So there’s certain things that are non-negotiables for me, right? And so if you believe certain things like, well, it’s going to be a short lived conversation, but we got to sift through that. And that’s the whole point of having a diverse classroom in all senses of the word.
Michael Harriot [00:19:14] Yeah. So I want to thank you for coming on today. I want to tell the listeners that Cristina said that about Touré, but she didn’t even join us. She ghosted us when we all had dinner in D.C. Still kind of mad at her about that because there was some good.
Dr. Christina Greer [00:19:28] I wasn’t invited.
Michael Harriot [00:19:29] There were some good arguements. You were invited. You was like, Nah, I’m not going to go. I saw the text. But of course I still want you all to download her podcast. My podcast. Subscribe. Download that Grio app. Listen on every platform. Tell your friends about it. And of course, we leave you every episode with a Black saying. And today’s Black saying is, “Race neutral? Now that’s some backwards thinking.” We’ll see you next time on theGrio Daily. If you like what you heard, please give us a five star review. Download theGrio app, Subscribe to the show and to share it with everyone you know. Please email all questions, suggestions and compliments to podcast at theGrio dot com.
Panama Jackson [00:20:13] You are now listening to theGrio’s Black Podcast network Black Culture Amplified.
Being Black: The ’80s [00:20:18] The Eighties gave us unforgettable songs from Bob Marley, De La Soul and Public Enemy. Being Black: The ’80s is a podcast docu series hosted by me, Touré, looking at the most important issues of the eighties through the songs of the decade. A decade when crack kingpins controlled the streets but lost their humanity. You couldn’t be like no soft, smiling, happy-go-lucky drug dealer. You had to suppress that. It was a time when disco was part of gay liberation. It provided information to counter narratives that were given to gay people by the straight world. This is the funkiest history class you’ll ever take. Join me, Touré, for Being Black: The ’80s on theGrio Black Podcast Network, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
