The case of the University of California vs. Bakke was more than an I did not get in, so I am upset with the school argument. This is a case of the law, treatment, Fourteenth Amen to be exact.
The Fourteenth Amendment extended the rights and liberties of the Bill of Rights to formerly enslaved people. But when we add affirmative action to the mix, the lines of fairness blur.
Bakke is trying to say that we - California - are violating the equal protection clause of the amendment by discriminating against him as a white man and not granting him a spot in our class.
However, the clause is not just about treating everyone the same but also about creating fairness for all. Affirmative action is set in place to help historically underrepresented groups gain an increased number of equal opportunities.
Therefore, this is not the same as the unfair discrimination against white people that Bakke is insisting that we have shown. We also did not break the equal protection clause because we were not discriminating against white people, we, as an institution, were trying to balance fairness and create a diverse future for America starting here at our institution.
Then, the argument trickles down to “Narrow Tailoring.” The law states that any policy that uses race has to pass a legal test called strict scrutiny. Meaning that the policy has to serve a compelling interest, and in our case, this interest is race.
Our main goal is to increase and encourage diversity in educational spaces.
The next requirement is that the policy has to be narrowly tailored, meaning that it cannot be too broad or go further than necessary to reach the goal.
In our defense, we meet these requirements because we only reserved a number of spots for minorities - but we did not exclude white applicants, nor did we discriminate against them. It is not our goal to harm anyone or wrongfully reject anyone from our school- we simply want to promote diversity and lessen systematic racism as well as systematic discrimination.
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