Webinar: Race Preferences: Past, Present, and Future

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide a crucial case involving race-based admissions policies in higher education. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, the justices may at long last put an end to the practice of deciding whether to admit students based on their skin color instead of their individual accomplishments. What will the justices say—and what will be the long-term ramifications of the Court’s ruling?

The Goldwater Institute invites you to a special webinar event on Tuesday, July 11, at 1 p.m. Arizona time (4 p.m. EDT), to discuss these questions with David E. Bernstein, author of Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America and Goldwater’s Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur. During the webinar, they’ll explore why academia insists on discriminating based on race, the irrationality of government-created ethnic categories, and the prospects for racial equality at a time when the principle of “color-blindness” is being denounced—bizarrely enough—as a form of racism.

Bernstein’s book Classified is a pathbreaking survey of the history and politics behind laws that define and separate Americans based on their racial ancestry. As Sandefur wrote in a review of the book, “Whether in its overtly hostile forms, or the allegedly helpful variety that seeks to grant favors to members of ‘disadvantaged’ groups, racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But as George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein makes clear in Classified, racism contains still another layer of incoherence: The assumption that people fit within racial categories that can be legally defined, compared, or contrasted is itself untenable.”

This is a free online event, but space is limited. Please register by clicking on the “Register” button. Once you have registered, a Zoom link to join the webinar will be emailed to you.

If you have any questions, please contact Shannon at events@goldwaterinstitute.org or call 602-633-8984.