Michigan Law School

Like many others, I find myself confused as to how I feel about this situation. O'Connor's points were all excellent and I agree with her that hopefully someday programs like this will not be needed, but her and Powell's reasons seemed different than the ones that we talked about in class. It was more about the value of diversity than giving everyone an equal opportunity. I do think that diversity is important but I think that doing it purely by race, ignores the diversity of experience within each race and things like disablities and family issues. But diversity doesn't solve racism, people will just be angry with the diversity and not find it helpful like the justices assume the would. I think equal opportunity is a much better goal and as we saw in our discussion, being againt that is pretty unpopular.

One of the things that perturbed me most was the statistics of minorities in high powered positions verses the total percentage of their populations. I feel uncomfortable with the fact that they have relatively no representation in both high positions and the military and yet are still ruled by them. I think that is proof that equal opportunity iniatives are needed, because if everyone was inherently given an equal opportunity there would not be such disproproportions of people who hold power. This is why I really feel that a market approach is not useful because how can you consider it fair if people can't even get in the door to be in the market? It's a skewed population. So in that sense I think it's okay for Michigan to do what it's doing, the just have to deal with the consequences that come with it. They have this reputation for being against whites, so maybe that will lose them some valuable prospective students. But in the mean time, hopefully there will be postive consequences of boosting minorities higher and that will even out the distribution of power.