On Tuesday, the Justice Department launched an investigation into the City University of New York, for racial discrimination in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
It is over allegations “that CUNY’s Black Male Initiative (BMI) provides educational benefits to minorities, particularly black males, on the basis of race.”
“The BMI is responsible for admissions, student recruitment, financial assistance, and academic support.”
“The program, as the name suggests, appears to favor select non-white minorities — primarily black males — over applicants of other races,” the Justice Department says in a press release.
Title VI bars schools that receive federal funds from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin.
“Race can never play a role when deciding how to distribute educational resources or opportunities,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon. “This Justice Department will not tolerate universities directing educational benefits to certain students over others based on their race.”
As The College Fix notes, “CUNY isn’t alone in facing Justice Department scrutiny. Trump officials recently concluded a year-long investigation into Yale School of Medicine and found that it “intentionally selected applicants based on their race.”
“Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students,” the Justice Department concluded.
The Justice Department learned that black and Latino applicants to Yale have significantly higher admission rates than white and Asian applicants with the very same test scores.
The Justice Department also recently launched an investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at Arizona State University following the release of several videos indicating DEI remains at the school despite a federal ban. The videos imply that “ASU denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin,” the Justice Department said.
On the progressive website Bluesky, lawyers claimed that these Justice Department investigations turn the law upside down, because, they falsely claim, the civil rights laws were designed to protect minorities, not white people.
These claims are wrong. The civil rights laws were passed to ban racial discrimination against all races, including whites.
The Supreme Court ruled a half century ago that Title VI generally prohibits racial discrimination against white people, in its decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978).
In its decision in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. (1976), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of white employees suing for racial discrimination when they were fired for being white.
While liberal judges have said that minorities can be given a preference in affirmative action or “diversity” plans, programs that exclude whites as a class have generally been considered illegal. A scholarship reserved for black people was struck down in Podberesky v. Kirwan (1994), for example.
And the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that minorities generally cannot be given a preference in college admissions, even to promote “diversity” or affirmative action.
