Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the man with the name of a Confederate general, the appearance of a Keebler Elf, and the heart of the Grinch at the beginning of the movie, is up to his old tricks again. Yesterday evening it was announced that Sessions' Department of Justice was turning its eye (of Sauron) on Harvard's affirmative action program. This follows a more general report from August that revealed the DOJ was going to target programs designed to help minority students at major universities.

Now, Jeff Sessions, the DOJ, and conservatives would point out that they aren't just looking out for white students who are "harmed" by affirmative action, but also Asian-American groups that have made claims that the programs hurt them as well, because "less qualified" black and latinx students get their spots. But make no mistake, this is little more than white conservatives using one minority as political cover against other minorities. It implies a cynical and faulty logic that would assume there is one pool of seats for white students and separate pools for Asian, black, latinx, and other minority students. Take the "Asian tax," which is the idea that Asian students have to score higher than their white classmates in order to get into schools, which was shown to be the case in a 2009 study. While it's important not to take away anything from a single study, one takeaway is that it shows it's less qualified white classmates who are taking spots that should go to Asian students, not kids who are being helped by Affirmative Action.

But let's put all that aside for a moment and examine the irony in all this. Just a few short weeks ago, a report was released about Harvard's incoming freshman class that showed 29 percent of the class of 2021 are legacy students, who overwhelmingly tend to be wealthy and white. To complain about the comparatively small Affirmative Action programs at schools like Harvard, while a program that was literally designed to keep the upper class white and protestant goes unchecked and unexamined is not just hypocritical, it's despicable.

It's worth noting that the groups of Asian-Americans who filed the complaint against Harvard are funded by Edward Blum. If you don't know who Edward Blum is, you should go listen to the More Perfect podcast episode about him right now. He's a conservative activist who funds legal cases that attempt to change laws through establishing new legal precedents. He was behind Abigail Fisher's unsuccessful lawsuit against the University of Texas's Affirmative Action program, and more worrisome, behind Shelby County v. Holder, the successful case that effectively undid massive swaths of the Voting Rights Act. This lawsuit against Harvard is part of a coordinated conservative attack on laws designed to protect minorities, and now? Now, Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice is on the side of those who are attacking.

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