Reinvent affirmative action as redress for slavery (opinion)

ineskoleva/iStock/Getty Images Plus The death knell for race-based affirmative action may give way for American descendants of slavery (ADOS), Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, to receive positive considerations in college admissions. With a particular look at lineage rather than race, the case also needs to be made for offering full-tuition support for ADOS pursuing higher education as a measure of reparative justice. The insights of Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch in this summer’s ruling in the Students for Fair Admissions cases brought against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may pave an interesting path forward in the decades-long race-based affirmative action battle. In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch called out what he deemed to be the arbitrary nature under which racial categorizations have been used in higher education. Gorsuch asserted that current racial categories are rooted in racial stereotypes and configured by bureaucrats with no expertise and unaided by insights from, say, ethnologists. “‘Black or African American’” as a category, he wrote, “covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a...