The NPR Politics Podcast - SCOTUS Banned Affirmative Action — Except At Military Service Academies

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

This summer, the Supreme Court overturned the legality of race-based affirmative action at higher education institutions everywhere, with one glaring exception: military service academies. Members of the conservative-leaning court like Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice John Roberts have long been staunch opponents of affirmative action initiatives, but in the case of service academies, the majority opinion cited that diversity in the officer ranks of the military was a "battlefield issue."Today, we bring you an episode from our colleagues at Code Switch. Co-hosts Gene Demby and Lori Lizarraga take us back to the Vietnam War to explain where that argument came from. And we'll hear from Mary Tobin, a Black woman, combat veteran, and West Point graduate, about why the Court's decision felt like such a blow to her.This episode was produced with help from Courtney Stein and engineering support from James Willetts.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, everyone. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And today on the show, we want to bring you some reporting from our dear friends over at Code Switch. That is the NPR show that you all want to be listening to if you want to better understand race, culture and history in the U.S. Now, earlier this year, the Supreme Court overturned the use of affirmative action in higher education, except in one place, U.S. military service academies. Code Switch took a look at why, and we want to share that episode with you all today. Gene Denby takes it from here. Just a heads up, y'all, this episode contains descriptions of violence and some salty language and a racial slur.

Should we start rolling? I'm rolling. Hi, Jane. How are you? Do you remember where you were when you heard about the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action? Because Mary Tobin definitely does. I was on my couch in my living room and my phone was blowing up. I was like, what is going on? And I turned on the television and I saw it.

I can't say the words that I yelled. That court decision left a lot of folks and a lot of colleges reeling. And it hit Mary particularly hard. Mary is a black woman. She was a captain in the U.S. Army. She's a combat veteran. And Mary is a proud graduate of a was a captain in the U.S. Army. She's a combat veteran. And Mary is a proud graduate of a U.S. military academy.

In her case, we're talking about West Point. And that's where she experienced something a lot of black college students do when they go to elite institutions. Even though I know what my SAT score was and my physical fitness score was, and I know my leadership abilities and why I was admitted, a lot of times the admissions process for Black students is framed as, oh, you all got here on quotas. And so I was repeatedly told that my freshman year. The only reason why you're here is because of affirmative action.

By the way, y'all, you are listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. And I'm Lori Lizarraga. Hearing Mary talk, Gene, she is such a good example of how affirmative action isn't just a policy for so many people. It's personal. It definitely, definitely is. And for Mary, it's especially personal. It's very defeating because the only reason why I was able to get into a school like West Point is because of what my mother did. My mother was a civil rights activist in her own right.

She marched with Dr. King and John Lewis, particularly in Nashville. She helped to desegregate lunch counters in Tennessee. She was one of the first black students to attend Vanderbilt University. And so I come from that legacy. And to think that we could have that progress cemented and it rolled back in a single stroke of a pen. Mary is proud to have gone to West Point. She knows she deserved to be there. But she also said a place like that would have historically been closed off to her unless it had been compelled to let her in. Does that make this decision even harder for Mary than Jean? Because when the Supreme Court outlawed race-based college admissions policies, the one significant exception where affirmative action is still allowed is the U.S. service

academies. Yeah, exactly. To your point, like that's a big thing that Mary is struggling with. Affirmative action is good enough for Black folks to die on behalf of this country, but it's not good enough for Black folks to have access to becoming among the best lawyers, teachers, doctors, engineers, artists that this country has to offer. I could die for this country, but I certainly can learn and instruct and save and build. And it felt like a direct slap in my face. And it was very disappointing and disheartening for me

because I asked myself, man, what was it all for? Why did I serve if I'm only looked at as cannon fodder? It's a lot, right? That just hurts. But that's what we're about to get into, y'all. If the Supreme Court said race-conscious recruitment, race-conscious admissions are not okay for colleges and universities,

why did the Supreme Court say it was okay for these colleges, the nation's service academies? Ever since we first learned about this exception, we've had so many questions, right, Gene? For starters, conservatives on the court have long attacked affirmative action in college admissions as undercutting merit, as if it's a way in for unqualified students of color, which is just totally not true. But if that's their argument, then why would the justices uphold affirmative action anywhere? Right. Like either the Constitution prohibits the use of race in college admissions or it doesn't. It just feels like it shouldn't matter if a student of color is trying to graduate as an engineer or a teacher or a military officer. Right. It's so wild, Lori, because like the Department of Defense, which obviously oversees the military,

they were among the parties making that exact case during oral arguments before the court. Our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of a diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer. So it is a critical national security imperative to attain diversity within the officer corps. And at present, it's not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions,

including at the nation's service academies. And to be clear, to be clear, the DOD and other U.S. government agencies were not just citing the effectiveness of diversity for the military, but its effectiveness at all the nation's universities for all segments of society as a matter of national security. No one in those briefs was making the argument that affirmative action should only remain at the U.S. military academies. But for some reason, the justices only carved out that exception for the military service academies. Which is just wild because Justice John Roberts and Clarence Thomas have been very staunch opponents of diversity initiatives, period.

She says with understatement. So how did we end up with affirmative action for only service academies? Let's get into it. Because when Justice Roberts wrote in that opinion that the military academies had, quote, potentially distinct interests, end quote, when it came to affirmative action, he was pointing to the military's own relatively recent history of really ugly internal racial conflict among the rank and file. Okay. So, first of all, how many service academies does this exception even apply to, Gene? Like, how many students go to military academies each year? Yeah, let's kind of like set the scene here.

So, we were digging around and we figured out that there were about 15,000 students enrolled at the service academies, right? To put that in perspective, there are about 15 million students enrolled at undergraduate institutions across the country. So we're talking about a very small portion of the college population here. You know what I mean? That's like a tenth of a percent of all the students in college in the U.S. Right. Tiny, tiny, tiny. Beep, beep, boop, boop, boop, boop. Lower the calculator.

And those 15,000 students are spread across five U.S. service academies. You've got the Army, which has the U.S. Military Academy in West Point in New York. That's where Mary went. The Navy has the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The Air Force has the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

There's also the Coast Guard Academy and the Merchant Marine Academy. West Point. That's the United States Naval Academy. Come to the Air Force Academy. U.S. Coast Guard Academy. United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York. What's a merchant marine? I'm going to be real with you, Lori.

I've been trying to figure this out. I don't know. No shit. I think they're a military academy. Maybe not. Don't be mad at me, Merchant Marines? I'm going to be real with you, Lori. I've been trying to figure this out. I don't know. I think they're military. They're kind of. Maybe not. Don't be mad at me, merchant marines. I'm sorry, y'all. But apparently, all these military academies, merchant marine and otherwise, are really

hard to get into, right, G? If you just look at acceptance rates, these are among the most selective colleges in the country. Oh, wow. Only about 11% of students who apply get into these schools, So that's similar to like Georgetown, NYU, and UCLA. So you've got to have really good grades. You've got to have really good extracurriculars. Okay, so all the regular elite college admissions stuff.

All that stuff. And on top of that, you also got to be in really good shape. Which is just cruel. Right, exactly. And applicants at most of these academies also need to be appointed, essentially nominated, by a member of the U.S. Congress. So a senator or a member of the House. Wow, really?

Okay. So, I mean, getting in here is not casual. Yeah, it's not like the easiest reference to get. Right, exactly. Well, three of my uncles actually served. Gene and my baby cousin is currently serving. But they all enlisted right out of high school. Yeah, that's exactly right, Lori. Like most people in the military take the route that your uncles did, that your cousin did. They enlist. But it's really hard to become an

officer that way. And that's where the service academies come in. They are just like traditional four-year colleges in that you graduate with a degree, but they're a direct pipeline to becoming the next officers in the military. So the brass, the people who give the commands, the people in charge. And there are other ways to become an officer, but the academies, they carry with them a special prestige. I mean, the academies only produce about a fifth of all military officers, and a good portion of military officers do come from ROTC programs at civilian colleges. Which is the argument for maintaining affirmative action everywhere.

Exactly. And this is going to surprise no one, but the service academies have always been predominantly white and male on purpose. And the service academies have historically been very hostile to people who are not those things. West Point, for example, was founded back in 1802. Its first black graduate wasn't allowed in until 1870s because, you know, the whole slavery thing.

That all just not. Yeah, that little thing. And the military as a whole wasn't officially desegregated until the 1940s. The first women weren't allowed into West Point until 1976. Wild. Okay, Gene, so with all that in mind, what do the demographics of the military look like these days? So the military's rank and file actually looks like your cousin and your uncle's.

Really? So lots of Latino teenagers, lots of young black folks enlist right out of high school. People of color make up about 40% of all service members. White folks make up the rest. But when it comes to those higher up positions, the officers we're talking about, three out of every four officers are white. So you can see the disparity. Yeah. Right.

Okay. There it is because the people calling the shots are white while a pretty significant portion of the people taking the orders are not exactly yeah and this is where that military history is so crucial to understanding why the military says that lack of diversity is so detrimental, right? And it's how the justices made the argument for why diversity, or lack thereof, is a, quote, battlefield issue. They pointed to what happened during the Vietnam War. These are U.S. soldiers fighting on Vietnam's front lines.

They are giving their lives. Let's all hop in the Wayback Machine. It's Sunday, July 20th, 1969, and much of the world is watching the moon landing on TV. So cool. That same night, back here on Terra Firma, it was a humid night in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and things were about to get really ugly. So Jacksonville is the home of Camp Lejeune, which is the training ground for future Marines.

And that night, a bunch of those Marines were partying at a bar near the base. They were turning up before they got deployed. In the official reports, it said there were something like 150 Black Marines, 100 white Marines, all at the same spot. And most of them had come from the poor rural South. It's 1969, right? That's barely 15 years since Brown v. Board of Education. And all the backlash that came with it.

So the Marines on that base had almost certainly lived segregated lives up until that point, where then they find themselves for the first time living and training together. Right. The Vietnam War was the first war in which the U.S. military was completely desegregated. And some of the people there probably didn't even sign up for this, right, because of the draft. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Right. So you can imagine it's muggy. People are drinking, just generally bristling. And as everybody is starting to leave the function, a white Marine burst into the room. He's all bloody, and he said that he'd been beaten up by some of the black dudes. Oh, wow. All hell breaks loose. Marines start thumping in the bar,

they start fighting outside the bar, and it went on like that for a half hour or so, and when the dust settles, one of those Marines was dead from head injuries. That melee became known as the Camp Lejeune incident, and it got a lot of attention at the time. But the thing is, it was hardly isolated. The year before, black soldiers who were being punished by their officers in Saigon, in Vietnam, rose up and took over the military jail where they were being held. On this aircraft carrier called the USS Kitty Hawk, there was a fight between black and white sailors, which became a full-scale riot, according to the Navy. A racial incident on another ship became a near mutiny. There were all these other conflagrations among troops stationed at U.S.

bases in Germany, in Spain, all across the United States. And also, on the very rare occasions during this war, when white soldiers encountered black commanding officers, of which there weren't many, they told them, quote, they weren't going to be taking orders from a nigger. Oh, my God. So you have black soldiers in Vietnam who were regularly deserting because of the way they were being treated by racist white commanding officers. You have black soldiers who are way overrepresented among draftees and casualties. Something like one in four Marines on the front lines were black in the early parts of the war and in the army.

About one in five people who were killed were black. So there were these hundreds of thousands of young men, many of whom were drafted and did not want to be there. Many of whom didn't believe in the war. Many of whom didn't like each other. And so, yes, the military was in this moment of real crisis. Wow. Yeah, it sounds like they're at war on the battlefield and at war with each other. Yes. A congressional subcommittee looked into the incident at Camp Lejeune

and others like it to get to the root of all this and consider what they could do to keep it from happening again. And one of the biggest takeaways? There just wasn't enough diversity among officers in the military. White officers were blind to

or were pointedly dismissing concerns from Black GIs and Black Marines and Black sailors, which meant they had no idea just how bad morale was. Yeah, it sounds like the ranks were a pressure cooker and the white military leadership ranks were missing just how much everything was building up and generally just not working. Exactly.

So the military decided it needed to prioritize making sure there were more Black commanders, more Black officers across the board to help make these things work, which led to the military academies adopting a program of affirmative action to help make all this possible. And that's why so many former military leaders made the argument to the Supreme Court in this case we've been talking about, that affirmative action and diversity in the military was a, quote, battlefield issue. So all that history, that is the backdrop to the Supreme Court's carve-out for the service academies. Whew, that's a lot of context.

But Gene, just because the DOD came to that conclusion, right? Like after the Vietnam War, to make a more concerted effort enrolling POC into service academies and leadership positions. That doesn't really tell us if the military has been doing a great job with diversity. I mean, does it?

Not at all. Not at all. When we come back, retired Army Captain Mary Tobin talks about being part of the brass and the challenges of culture fit. The dominant culture of the military is that of white, cisgendered, heterosexual, Protestant men, period. I'm not saying that that is good or bad. I'm saying it just is. So if you dress, behave, listen to music, think through missions, even in a way that is not akin to the white dominant culture,

you are an outcast. Stay with us. Lori. Gene. Code Switch. For the United States military, having a diverse officer corps is a critical national security imperative. We're talking about affirmative action. Specifically, the carve-out to the new ban where the court actually upheld affirmative action at the highly selective academies of the U.S. military. And Lori, before the break, we met Mary Tobin. She's a former military officer who graduated 20 years ago from West Point.

West Point, of course, is one of those service academies that is newly protected from this affirmative action ban. And when Mary graduated in 2003, she told me there were 25 black women in her West Point class. So 25 out of 1,000 students thousand students. And at the time, that was West Point's largest ever cohort of black women. Wild. Yes, right. Since then, Mary has been really involved with the alumni-led diversity initiatives at West Point. She says, look, she knows the military academies and officer life are a hard sell to people of color, in part because the military has this long involvement in American racism. She said when she told her father that she was joining the military, that he called her a baby killer.

She said she wasn't even considering joining the armed forces. And she ended up on the path to becoming an officer almost entirely by accident. When I was a little girl in Atlanta, Georgia, my mother had plans for me to attend Spelman College. Mary had great grades in high school, and, you know, getting into the most storied Black women's college in the country, that was a really big deal to her and her mother. Her mom had been a civil rights activist. She had organized to make it easier for Black women to go to college.

But Mary and her mom's plan to get to Spelman all changed when Mary got her class schedule in the 10th grade and her school placed her in JROTC, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. My sophomore year, though, I was placed involuntarily into junior ROTC. You say involuntarily? Involuntarily. How was that involuntary? So in our high school, about 10% of the sophomore class would be placed into JROTC. That's when I found out that my stepfather was a Korean War veteran. And he tells my mother, I think it'll be good for her. And so

I got placed in JROTC. And so I was stuck. What was JROTC like for those of us who haven't been through that process? I always have to pay tribute to the senior army instructor. His name is Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas J. Burke. Old white guy, white hair, just white as snow, steely blue eyes. And he always said that some of the smartest, best soldiers he ever served with were Black men who never had the opportunity to become officers. And so he decided to become a senior Army instructor in high school JROTC programs and expose Black and Brown kids to all of the opportunities that the Army or the military provided. But he was particularly focused on service academies. And so he ran his program like it was a West Point or an

Annapolis or an Air Force Academy. Meaning if you became a leader in his program, we had to study the New York Times and the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution. And we had to know all the bylines, like what's happening in finance, econ, internationally, globally, what's pop culture. We had to know what was happening in elections. And so I essentially became this refined officer. Then I'm like, wait, I got more rank, which means I'm telling more people to do. And so I kind of caught that leadership bug, like, man. And then people are respecting me.

And so something was beginning to turn in my mind. Like, ah, you know, yep, Spelman is still a goal, but maybe Colonel Burke is on to something here. You had the goal of going to Spelman your whole life, and it changed. But that wasn't just your goal, that was your mom the goal of going to Spelman your whole life and it changed. But that wasn't just your goal. That was your mom's goal, too. So how does she feel about the fact that you decided to go to West Point instead of Spelman? My mother cried.

She cried real tears when I decided to go to West Point versus Spelman. It wasn't until my senior year when news of my acceptance into West Point made the newspaper and my pastor at church, who he also served in the Air Force, he's talking about it from the pulpit and you've made a big deal out of it. And now it's like, wait, my mother's getting church famous and community famous, you know, in the South for a Black woman, a Black mother of the church in the South. Like that is it. West Point is so different from Atlanta, right? What were your first impressions of the place when you got there? The challenge at West Point is your entire freshman year, we call it plebe year, is very challenging. There are certain ways of walking, talking, behaving, the rules that you have. You have to earn privileges

as you go through the year. And it is hard. It is hard for everyone. I say that all the time. West Point is the only place that I think is very equitable in its ability to make things suck. West Point is very rigorous in the number of credit hours you're taking in order to ensure that at baseline you have an engineering degree. But you're also taking classes like military history. You're learning strategy tactics of every single war. You're learning how officers think that there's also etiquette classes. So, you know, there's a lot of ballroom dancing. I know how to ballroom dance. There's a lot about performing and behaving in the upper class society that we learn. Truly becoming an officer and a gentleman or a gentlewoman,

I really got to understand how white people move through the world, honestly, and the nuances of how you behave, speak, how you engage, network, those things that get you into rooms and spaces and places and opportunities that don't have anything to do with your degree. That's what I got from West Point, I believe. I'm curious how that played out for you as a Black woman who was an officer. I graduated on May 31st, 2003, 23 years old. Six months later, I was in Iraq, commanding a platoon of 50 men because my unit had to get a waiver for me as a woman to be in the unit. It was a combat arms unit, a field artillery unit. And going into war at the time, women were not allowed to serve directly in combat arms units. And now I am this young, wet behind the ears, had never served in an active

duty military unit. And now they got to listen to me simply because of the rank that I have on. So you get introduced to this giant unit of 50 soldiers and you're technically their commanding officer. What was the racial breakdown of the enlisted soldiers that you were commanding? It was pretty equitable between white and black soldiers. There's also a lot of our Latino brothers in that unit too. So it was almost like a third, a third, a third. Now all the officers were white men. There were no other races represented in the officer corps. How did those differences play out once you were in Iraq? You know, initially the differences played out because I'm a woman.

I had to reassert, I'm an officer. You don't question me when I give you an order because I could feel that tension. Like they didn't trust what I was saying. And oftentimes I'm thinking to myself, is it because I'm a woman or is it because I'm black? And I could never tell, but there were moments where I could feel the lack of trust in my expertise. I could feel like you can't tell me what to do or I'm going to disobey you anyway. And there were some very tense moments in my first deployment where I'm having to assert I'm an officer you stand in attention when you talk to me

and I hated that I hated that because I wanted there to be mutual respect and trust not let me hold my rank up and demand that you respect me because that was

a stark contrast from why I even decided to go to West Point. Right, exactly. The Army, we used to have this saying, that everybody is green in the Army, meaning no one is black or brown or white. Everybody's wearing the same fatigues, the same uniforms. But, of course, we know from being on this beat covering race, that kind of colorblindness never really means that race doesn't matter so much. It means that it's like it's not okay to talk about it,

like talking about it is strongly discouraged. I wonder how you feel about that, given your experiences on your tours. Gene, I will tell you, you just articulated it perfectly. I hate the statement, I don't see color. I hate the statement, there are no colors in the military, we're all green. I hate that because it's not true. It's not true in any objective way. The dominant culture of the military is that of white, cisgender, heterosexual, Protestant men, period. I'm not saying that that is good or bad. I'm saying it just is.

So if you dress, behave, listen to music, think through missions, even in a way that is not akin to the white dominant culture, you are an outcast. I can't tell you, Jean, how many times I was told that I wasn't being a team player, not because I wasn't good at my job, but because I didn't feel like going and listening to country music at a bar after we just had a hard training day. That is not my idea of decompressing. And it was a hard choice for me, but I chose to be

authentic. I mean, I can't fight an actual war and then fight this me, but I chose to be authentic. I mean, I can't fight an actual war and then fight this cultural war. I got to figure out how to save myself some way. And I chose myself, but that was in direct opposition to the pathway to success as an officer. Do you think that that hindered you in moving up the officer ranks? Most certainly. I mean, it's not even conjecture. I mean, I was told this, it was placed on some of my performance evaluations. I was always ranked in the top three of officers in my unit for performance, skill and competency, but in terms of fitness and not physical fitness but culture fit unit fit i was always dinged on that yeah

did you ever talk to any of the enlisted people in your unit or other officers about this race stuff like i mean you were obviously experiencing it but did you did it ever come up or did you ever have spaces where i could talk about it yeah you, most of my sergeants that were kind of my right-hand men, all of them were white with the exception of one. And so over time, they would see and acknowledge how I was treated. I can't tell you how many times I've had that conversation. Ma'am, I don't think it's right. So I could come to my white enlisted soldiers who were working alongside me and talk about it if I wanted to. But most times they talked about it to me because they felt that. I did have an officer who served with me in my first deployment, a Lieutenant Colonel,

and he took me under his wing when I first got to Iraq. And he is the person that would see how I was treated. And they would take me in back of the operations center and go, okay, LT, go ahead and cry it out. You got two minutes, cry. Like, get it out. Get it out. All right. All right. Breathe. Now, we know that they're going to come for you. We know what they're saying. Now, let's figure out how to do the mission. Because if you keep crying, men die.

And that's on you. How often did you come across other Black officers when you were doing your tours? Very, very rarely Black officers in the combat arms is significantly lower than Black officers in support units across the board. I acknowledge I am able to walk into rooms and be in spaces and places that other Black folks can't just as easily walk into. I have a West Point ring, and when I wear that West Point ring, it is entrance, it is admission into some of the most powerful spaces and places in this country. At the same time, I can be in that room and have a former general who is much older than myself walk up to me and treat me like the wait staff and ask me to refresh his drink in those same rooms. That's why it's been hard to recruit

Black officers into these combat arms units, because you know, without a shadow of a doubt, the experiences you're going to have being black in this country. I sometimes I'm going to make the choice to serve this country the best way that I can without torturing myself in that service. And it's hard because the brothers and the sisters who choose the combat arms route, they are the cream of the crop. I would trust them with my life. But a lot of them get out very, very bitter and very broken from their time in. And I wish with all my heart that wasn't the case. Mary had planned her whole life to go to a historically black college in Atlanta, very much not West Point. And she ended up there. She ended up doing really well.

But she struggled through the ground of it all, like all cadets do. She had to deal with the hazing and all the microaggressions on top of that. And thinking about that, Gene, I'm just wondering, like, how would anyone be able to tell the difference? Wait, what do you mean? Just like between the harassment and intimidation that's, you know, a rite of passage for everyone in military life versus like prejudice. It just might be kind of hard to suss out why this higher ranking person is yelling at you. Like, is it to tub you up or I don't know, is it something else? Yes. Yes. That's a great question. I mean, I was thinking about this in the context of Mary's mom. Like, remember,

Mary's mom was one of the first black students at Vanderbilt in Tennessee. And obviously they were going to school at very different historical moments. Her mom was getting yelled at and harasseded too. I just bet there was a lot of stuff about each of their experiences that would have been really legible to the other person. And you can kind of see why Mary thinks of her advocacy around diversity at her alma mater is downstream from her mother's life's work. And that's who she thought of first when she heard the court's decision

to strike down affirmative action. So my mother was committed to equity in education. She helped desegregate a whole college. And she was the first person in her family to go to college. So in that moment, the first person I thought about was her. I went to her gravesite that day and I just sat there and I was just like, mom, I'm so sorry that I have to pick up this fight. I thought we were past this. Now it stands to reason. Now we have to examine why did we never cut out the true source of the disease in the first place? Because make no mistake about it, affirmative action was simply triaging a bullet wound or a disease. And from the start of our country, education has been the battleground for access, not only to civil rights and human rights, but just to the American dream.

If formerly enslaved folks were literally denied the ability to read and write by legislation and law, of course, that has to be the source of where we address inequity in this country. And as long as that remains, we will always have a need for legislature, law, Congress to try and right that ship. Power can seize nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will. So I cannot trust that removing affirmative action will create equity. I can't. It barely created equity in the first place. No matter what side of the affirmative action decision you come down on, the court's decision to ban race-conscious admissions policies with a caveat creates a whole new set of questions. Right.

Because if the court agreed that the military really does need to uphold affirmative action as a matter of national security, eventually it's not going to be enough for only the armed forces to have affirmative action at the U.S. Service Academies. Because, as we mentioned before, a good portion of military officers become officers through ROTC programs at civilian colleges. Where the court just banned affirmative action. Exactly. And now the opponents of affirmative action are turning their sights on the five service academies, those last holdouts. I mean, one group already has a website, Gene.

Westpointnotfair.org. Okay. First thing it says, were you rejected from West Point, the Naval Academy, or Air Force Academy? It may be because you're the wrong race. Wow. Other opponents are gearing up to challenge corporate boards and minority scholarship and fellowship programs on the grounds of racial preference. There are even employment lawsuits pending. Experts are pointing to the slippery slope nature of this decision, right? I mean, if affirmative action is racial

discrimination as defined by the court, then diversity initiatives could be banned in employment next. So what you're saying is the coming legal battle over affirmative action at the military academies might tell us a whole lot about the fate of affirmative action everywhere. That was Gene Demby

and Lori Lizaraga from Code Switch. The reporting was produced by Christina Calla with a huge help from Courtney Stein. It was edited by Dalia Mortada and engineered by James Willetts. We'll be back in your feeds as usual tomorrow with a fresh episode. Until then, I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the

NPR Politics Podcast.