00:00 Supreme Court has banned the use of race and ethnicity in university admissions
00:05 dealing a major blow to affirmative action policies. The practice has been
00:10 used for decades to boost the educational opportunities for
00:13 African-Americans and other minorities in the US. Covering this is Ketavan
00:18 Gorjastani, she's our Washington correspondent, she's with me now. Ketavan
00:22 just explain to us how the Supreme Court reached this decision.
00:28 Well the Supreme Court and the conservative majority of the Supreme
00:32 Court, it's a 6-3 decision, ruled that affirmative action violated the equal
00:38 protection clause of the 14th Amendment and therefore said that these
00:42 universities and colleges could no longer use explicitly the factor of race
00:49 in their admissions process. Now this is overturning a decades-long precedent.
00:55 Affirmative action really has been upheld and decided for decades, several
01:02 times in recent decades for over 40 years. So this is going back on four
01:08 decades of precedent and this decision and this opinion was written by the
01:14 Chief Justice Roberts and he said in that opinion that eliminating racial
01:20 discrimination means eliminating all of this. So the legal argument is the equal
01:26 protection clause but the moral argument according to the Chief Justice is that
01:31 they cannot use discrimination if they want to eliminate discrimination in the
01:38 United States as a whole and therefore they need to do this in another way.
01:43 Promoting diversity, helping those minorities get into these schools cannot
01:48 be done based solely on the factor of race. This case was actually brought by
01:55 people who said that affirmative actions was unfairly discriminating against
02:02 Asian Americans and white Americans in favor of black and Latino Americans. In a
02:08 dissent though, the Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that this would have a
02:14 devastating impact on US society. And Ketavan, I suppose the big question now
02:19 is what does this mean for American universities?
02:24 Well they will no longer be able for example to have a box where you check
02:29 your race when you apply to a university or a college but there was something a
02:34 very clear that was written by Chief Justice Roberts in that opinion. He said
02:39 that this opinion would not prevent universities from considering
02:46 applicants who possibly can discuss the influence, the consequence of race on
02:53 their lives, the impact of race on their lives. So race neutral elements will be
02:59 able to be taken into account which will possibly result in taking into account
03:04 race but not directly. I'll give you just one example. When you apply to a US
03:10 college you often have to write an essay explaining why you would be a good fit
03:15 for the university, what in your life makes you a great candidate and in those
03:19 essays often especially people who come from minority communities talk about the
03:26 influence of race. These things are still going to be able to be used but that
03:32 said in states where affirmative action has already been banned like California
03:36 and Michigan they have seen diversity numbers drop drastically in the past
03:41 years. Ketavan Ghorjasani in Washington thank you very much indeed for
03:45 explaining a little of that story coming out of the United States today.
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