In response to the Supreme Court’s decision today striking down affirmative action policies intended to redress historical racial inequities, National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) President and CEO Jesse Van Tol released the following statement:
“Given the enormity of the pain, neglect and targeted hardship that the US government and private businesses have inflicted on Black Americans for hundreds of years, the handful of formal efforts our country makes to even the odds for people of color have always been paltry. Now we are losing one of the few examples of tangible and effective anti-racism policy that American institutions ever came up with.
“The end of affirmative action will have repercussions far beyond college campus life. Higher education is no longer one of many options along the path to upward mobility and generational wealth-building – It is a requirement. Even low-skill office work is basically inaccessible for anybody who doesn’t have a degree.
“This is a setback for the nation’s slow march toward equality in education, but it’s not the end of the road. Educators and policy makers will need to design new processes to ensure under-represented communities are no longer under-represented, and that higher education and the upward mobility it fuels is an opportunity for all Americans.”
