Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university’s diversity policy. In addition to framing post-secondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally framed students of color who are admitted to the University of Texas at Austin as academically unqualified. The purpose of this article is to examine Ms. Fisher’s arguments against the University of Texas’s diversity policy as presented in Fisher v. University of Texas from a critical race theoretical perspective. In addition to obfuscating the fact that admission to the top colleges and universities in the United States has become more competitive, Ms. Fisher’s anti-diversity arguments also are consistent with a racial ideology and socially conservative agenda that frames people of color as undeserving of the opportunities traditionally associated with White people. The goal of this article is to not only situate Fisher v. University of Texas as a strategic project of Whiteness, but to also discuss what critical race theory can still teach scholars and researchers concerned with understanding race in education.
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