The matter of having race as a
component part of the admissions process of a school in California university
in the U.S. came to the fore once again on May 6, 2026 when the U.S. Department
of Justice publicly announced its finding that the UCLA School of Medicine “illegally
used race as a selection criteria (sic) for candidates and admitted Black and
Latino students who had lower academic qualifications than their (W)hite and
Asian counterparts.”[1]
The racial discrimination was against White students and students from Asia who
had higher academic qualification. Accordingly, assistant Attorney General
Harmeet Dhillon wrote, “Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American,
and this Department will not allow it to continue.”[2]
In fact, it could be argued that the sheer existence of race in the criteria
for the admission of medical students is racist, taking that term to mean “pertaining
to race” without the pejorative connotations that racism has. To be sure, the
unique historical disadvantage of Black Americans, including when the institution
of slavery existed in the antebellum period of the South, arguably justified
making up for the legacy of continuing prejudice by preferential treatment in
college admissions. It is important to acknowledge that affirmative action
programs contained racial prejudice against another race, and in the twenty-first
century the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the racial harm over institutional
efforts to redress racial prejudice, perhaps because the latter had diminished
considerably especially since the 1960s. UCLA may not have caught up with this
recognition because ideology tends to lag changes in the world due to emotional
investment and the long-standing nature of values. So the justice department’s accusation
that the medical school (and thus the university) intentionally violating the
relevant court rulings can be viewed as a sort of recalibration as well as an
assertion that laws should not be violated.
The full essay is at "UCLA's School of Medicine."
2 Ibid.
