Racial Misdirection: How Anti-affirmative Action Crusaders use Distraction and Spectacle to Promote Incomplete Conceptions of Merit and Perpetuate Racial Inequality

Abstract

Despite the marginal success that anti-affirmative action groups have had at paring back the use of race in college admissions practices, affirmative action has remained largely in-tact as a tool to promote diversity on college campuses. But what might happen if “diversity”—the very thing that heretofore has protected affirmative action—was used instead as proof of its supposed unfairness? In this paper, focusing on the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case, we will employ Political Spectacle Theory to analyze the strategies and tactics used by the anti-affirmative action groups to distract from their real aims and to divert focus away from mitigating structural inequality.