About This Case Study

Affirmative action in college admissions has been among the most contested policies in American educational life since its emergence in the 1960s. The contestation is not chiefly over the facts of racial inequality in access to higher education, which are well documented; it is over how to interpret that inequality, what counts as a fair remedy, and whether the explicit consideration of race in admissions repairs a racial order or perpetuates one. In 2023, in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court held that race-conscious admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause, ending a regime that had stood, in various forms, for roughly half a century. The decision was hailed by its supporters as the triumph of a color-blind constitution and denounced by its critics as the abandonment of racial equity.

This case study takes that contest as its object. It works across three freely accessible sources, each occupying a different position: the Institute for Youth in Policy's chronological history of affirmative action policy; a New Economic Thinking discussion of affirmative action's future and the fight for equality; and SCOTUSblog's reporting on the SFFA decision itself. The analytical move is to read the debate not as a clash of fixed positions but as a struggle over framing — over how the language of merit, fairness, neutrality, and opportunity is deployed to make race matter, or to make it appear not to matter, in the distribution of educational opportunity. The unit's concept of color-blind racism, drawn from Bonilla-Silva, is the instrument learners bring to the sources; the sociological treatments by Carter and Lippard and the legal analysis by Driver are available for those who wish to extend the reading, but the three free sources carry the exercise.

Before You Begin

Pre-reading is required. Engage each source closely enough to identify how it frames affirmative action and the role of race:

• "Origins and Evolution of Affirmative Action Policies in the United States." Institute for Youth in Policy. 2023. (yipinstitute.org)
• "The Future of Affirmative Action & the Fight for Equality." New Economic Thinking. 2024. (youtube.com)
• "Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action Programs in College Admissions." SCOTUSblog. 2023. (scotusblog.com)

You should also have at hand your notes on Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, especially the account of color-blind racism and its recurring rhetorical frames. Bonilla-Silva's framework is the analytic instrument you will bring to the sources in the exercise's later phases. Those who have read Carter and Lippard's The Death of Affirmative Action? or Driver's The Fall of Affirmative Action may draw on them, but neither is required.

While engaging the sources, keep these prompts in mind:

• How does this source explain why affirmative action exists — what problem does it say the policy was meant to address?
• What language does this source use to characterize the consideration of race: as a remedy, a preference, a form of discrimination, a diversity interest?
• Who is the source's audience, and what is it trying to do for that audience?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Establishing the Arc (12–15 minutes)

Begin with the Institute for Youth in Policy history to build a working chronology. In your notes, identify:

1. Origins. Where does the source locate the beginning of affirmative action, and what rationale does it attribute to that beginning — remedy for past discrimination, equal opportunity, integration, diversity?
2. The major cases. List the Supreme Court cases the history treats as turning points — for example Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Fisher v. University of Texas, and SFFA v. Harvard (2023). For each, note in a phrase what shifted.
3. The shift in rationale. Track how the stated justification for race-conscious admissions changes across the chronology — particularly the move from remedying past discrimination toward the "diversity" rationale. Why might the rationale have shifted, and with what consequences?

Then turn to the SCOTUSblog report on SFFA and add the endpoint: what, precisely, did the Court hold, and on what constitutional reasoning?

For groups: assign the IYP history and the SCOTUSblog report to different members or pairs; reconvene to assemble a shared chronology from origins to 2023.

Phase 2: Reading the Framing (12–15 minutes)

Now bring Bonilla-Silva's framework to bear. Color-blind racism, in his account, defends or explains racial inequality through ostensibly nonracial language — appeals to merit, individual choice, fairness, and the market — while disavowing race as a category that should matter to policy. Work through the following in your notes:

• The vocabulary of neutrality. Across the three sources and the case language they report, identify the specific words and phrases through which the consideration of race is characterized as unfair or the refusal to consider race is characterized as neutral — "merit," "colorblind," "equal treatment," "preference," "discrimination." Who uses which terms, and to what end?
• The work the framing does. Take one argument against affirmative action as reported in the sources. Using Bonilla-Silva, analyze what the language of neutrality accomplishes: what does framing race-conscious admissions as a "preference" or a form of "discrimination" make visible, and what does it obscure about the distribution of educational opportunity?
• The counter-framing. How do the sources represent the arguments for affirmative action — and on what terms? Does the defense of the policy contest the language of neutrality, or accept it and argue within it (for instance, by emphasizing "diversity" benefits rather than remedy)? What is gained or lost by arguing on the opponent's terms?

For groups: divide a sheet or shared document into two columns — language of neutrality and what it obscures — and fill them collaboratively.

Phase 3: Settled or Relocated? (8–10 minutes)

The New Economic Thinking discussion turns from the history to the future: what happens to the fight for educational equality after race-conscious admissions are foreclosed? Use it to address the central question of the exercise.

Resist the easy conclusion that SFFA simply ended the role of race in admissions. The harder and more useful question is whether the role of race was ended or relocated. Develop, in writing or discussion, a two-part answer:

1. What the decision foreclosed. Name precisely what is now legally prohibited — the explicit consideration of an applicant's race as a factor in admissions.
2. Where race may have been relocated. Drawing on the New Economic Thinking discussion and your own reasoning, identify where the consideration of race might persist or reappear after SFFA — in application essays narrating racial experience, in "race-neutral" proxies such as geography or socioeconomic status, in recruitment and pipeline programs, in the discourse of diversity that universities continue to assert. Does foreclosing the explicit factor dissolve the role of race, or push it into less visible forms?

Where the foreclosure and the relocation meet — where a policy designed to remove race from admissions generates new and less transparent ways for race to operate — is where the unit's argument about color-blindness is doing its work.

For groups: each member presents their foreclosure claim and their relocation claim; the group notes whether the relocation claims cluster around the same sites.

Closing Reflection

Complete this thought in two or three sentences:

The 2023 SFFA decision foreclosed __________. But the consideration of race may have been relocated to __________. Reading the affirmative action debate through the concept of color-blind racism changes my sense of what the language of "neutrality" and "merit" accomplishes, because __________.

The aim is not to render a verdict on whether affirmative action was good policy but to identify what the contest over it reveals about how race is made — and made not — to matter in the distribution of educational opportunity.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the three phases in order. The Phase 2 framing analysis and the Phase 3 two-part answer are the central artifacts; keep them for reference when answering Questions 4 and 5 (on Bonilla-Silva, and on Driver and Carter & Lippard) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 works well divided across the historical and the judicial sources; Phase 2 works as collaborative column-building; Phase 3 benefits from full-group discussion. The closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Return to Questions 4 and 5 in the unit's Questions for Reflection. Question 4 asks you to analyze an argument in the affirmative action debate using Bonilla-Silva's framework; Question 5 asks what SFFA settled and what it left open. The Phase 2 framing analysis and the Phase 3 two-part answer supply most of the material for both.
• To extend the exercise: read the additional affirmative action resources in the unit's Further Readings — the University of Chicago Law Review's "Affirmative Action at a Crossroads" collection, the Annenberg and Cornell reference materials, and NPR's day-of report on the decision. These deepen the legal and chronological picture the three core sources establish.
• For a fuller scholarly treatment, Carter and Lippard's The Death of Affirmative Action? (Key Scholarship) analyzes the racialized framing of the debate at length, and Driver's The Fall of Affirmative Action (Key Scholarship) examines the post-SFFA legal landscape. Reading either against this case study tests the framing analysis you developed here against a sustained book-length argument.