English: United States Supreme Court building in Washington D.C., USA. Front facade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Keli Goff

Now that the Supreme Court has kicked Fisher v. University of Texas, its first major affirmative action case in a decade, back to the lower court, the outcome is still up on the air. But something that experts interviewed by The Root appear to be in agreement on is that regardless of what happens with the case, affirmative action is at a crossroads.

Today even supporters of affirmative action, particularly in higher education, acknowledge that the system is far from perfect, with not nearly enough students who are in need of equal opportunity benefiting from the policy. Discussions with some of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject indicate that the biggest threat to affirmative action’s survival may not be the Supreme Court but the ever-changing definition of who is supposed to benefit from such programs, versus the reality of who actually is.

“The scope of affirmative action originally dealt with the disenfranchisement of African Americans here in this country, and I am using the term ‘African American,’ ” Clemson University professor Juan Gilbert noted when speaking with The Root. “Fast-forward [to] today and [look at] African Americans, and who’s benefiting?”

To that point, Editor-in-Chief of The Root Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier sparked nationwide discussion in 2004 when they noted that a majority of the black undergraduates at Harvard University did not fit the traditional definition of “African American.” They estimated that many, perhaps up to two-thirds, were immigrants or the children of immigrants — meaning that their parents probably, and their grandparents certainly, did not experience America’s particular brand of rampant legalized segregation and discrimination that predated the modern-day civil rights movement, of which affirmative action programs were an outcome.

via Affirmative Action Court Ruling: Can the Policy Survive?.