In June 2025, the Trump administration pressured University of Virginia (UVA) president James Ryan to resign, threatening to withdraw federal funding due to an alleged lack of compliance with civil rights law. Like other elite higher education institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and many others targeted by the Trump administration, UVA capitulated to the coercive authority and dictatorial weaponization of civil rights law.
UVA buckled under the pressure of a series of anti-DEI and anti-higher education executive orders issued by Donald Trump during his second term as president, targeting colleges and universities that resisted his racist, sexist, and transphobic agenda. The Trump administration has also targeted the college accreditation system in order to, among other goals, maintain ideological control over what is taught in university classrooms.
These and other executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies, and the autonomy of higher education institutions, rest on the erroneous idea that white people are victims of racial discrimination rather than the perpetrators and beneficiaries of an unjust system. My goal as an educator is to challenge these and other inaccurate beliefs in the classroom.
I’ve been teaching university students in Virginia since 2009, and during the past 16 years at least one of my students every year has expressed the belief that colleges routinely use “quotas” as part of their admissions process, and that Black students benefit unfairly from this practice. This is shocking, considering that the Supreme Court issued the decision to make the use of quotas in college admissions illegal in 1978, almost 50 years ago. I typically ask my students: How is it possible that such a blatantly inaccurate idea could persist for almost half a century? And what purpose do these false narratives serve within American society?
The fact that these false narratives persist despite evidence to the contrary reflects the power of two deeply held ideologies in the United States. First, systematic disinformation about affirmative action is rooted in anti-Blackness, a racist ideology that specifically and uniquely targets people who are racially identified as Black. Throughout the history of the United States, people of African descent have served the function of being the prototypical “other,” the group that represents the least desirable of all the undesirables. As sociologist Vilna Bashi Treitler wrote in her book The Ethnic Project, in order to gain favor from white people, nonwhite groups have historically distanced themselves from Black people or denigrated Black people in order to gain white acceptance, or to simply avoid being treated as badly as a Black person.
Anti-Blackness is at the heart of anti-affirmative action rhetoric by suggesting that “unqualified” Black students have stolen spots from “qualified” white students. The backlash against affirmative action is also rooted in the deeply held belief in the ideology of meritocracy, which posits that success results from our natural talents, individual efforts and abilities. The persistence of the inaccurate belief that racial quotas are being used in college admissions is evidence of the effectiveness of racist ideologies and the power they have to maintain the current system of racial capitalism in the United States.
How is it possible that such a blatantly inaccurate idea could persist for almost half a century? And what purpose do these false narratives serve within American society?
In his book Black Marxism, late political scientist Cedric Robinson used the term “racial capitalism” to highlight the interconnected and interdependent relationship between racism and modern capitalism. Racial capitalism as a concept posits that modern capitalism was always rooted in the exploitation of racialized “others”; it was not just an economic system rooted in class exploitation as some Marxists believe.
Chattel slavery of Africans is one of the clearest examples of racial capitalism in the United States. European colonizers used the ideology of white supremacy as a form of propaganda to dehumanize the personhood of Africans and their descendants in order to justify the inhumane methods used to extract free labor from which white settlers profited financially. Indeed, slavery is at the root of the success of most U.S. financial institutions — and, many of these institutions, like Wells Fargo, continue to profit from racially predatory and discriminatory practices.
Higher education institutions have historically played a key role in perpetuating racial capitalism in the United States. They benefited directly and indirectly from profits generated from the free labor of enslaved Africans whose descendants have never received reparations for hundreds of years of wage and labor theft. “Meritocracy” is an ideological weapon that the descendants of European colonizers currently use to justify a system built on the exploitation and dehumanization of Black bodies. The idea of meritocracy is used to justify a society where executive orders are created to legislate a white-centered and flawed teaching of history intended to keep the masses ignorant of how deeply inequitable this country is and has always been. Meritocracy also functions as a psychological prop for white folks who need to believe that they deserve to have more than other groups — that whiteness is in fact better, smarter, and more competent. Meritocracy cannot exist in a system rooted in racial capitalism, where racialized groups are exploited for the benefit of a more powerful majority group, and racial capitalism is as foundational to the U.S. economy, its financial, and its educational institutions as apple pie.
Anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in higher education has evolved and adapted to the colorblind ideology of the post-Civil Rights Era. Reminiscent of Lee Atwater’s “Southern Strategy,” white supremacy now draws on race-neutral language and dog whistles to make racist claims while maintaining plausible deniability. White public figures like President Donald Trump have reframed affirmative action policies designed initially to address centuries of systemic racism against Black people as “discriminatory” and “unmeritocratic” (“reverse racism”), despite the lack of empirical evidence to support this belief.
The persistence of the inaccurate belief that racial quotas are being used in college admissions is evidence of the effectiveness of racist ideologies and the power they have to maintain the current system of racial capitalism in the United States.
The myth of meritocracy plays an important ideological role in perpetuating racial capitalism in the U.S. Racial capitalism is about crafting an ideology that rationalizes the exploitation of racialized groups such that their exploitation is viewed as normal. The widespread misrepresentation of affirmative action policies as “unmeritocratic” fulfills this purpose by normalizing racial gaps in educational attainment and economic outcomes. Additionally, the use of inequitable gate-keeping tools such as Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs) and legacy policies that advantage the children of white elites and students belonging to an upper socioeconomic status in college admissions are tools of white supremacy (anti-Blackness in particular) that provide metaphorical fuel for the engine of racial capitalism.
SATs, Legacy Admissions, and Racial Capitalism
The SATs were created by Carl Bigham, a eugenicist who believed that Black people were intellectually inferior to white people, and that U.S. public education would progressively decline as white people intermixed with other races. True to its eugenicist roots, many studies have documented that the SATs continue to be biased against Black students and other students of color, as well as against low-income students. For example, sociologist Joseph Soares points to the biased practice of excluding experimental SAT questions from the exam when Black students perform better on them than white students. Soares also notes that Black students perform better than white students on tests that are based on the delivery of a curriculum actually taught in high school. However, the SATs were developed to assess “aptitude” for learning, not competence in a particular subject matter. It is no surprise, then, that Black students do not perform as well on the SATs as their white (and Asian) peers.
Yet, SATs have become a staple requirement for admission to most colleges and universities, following Harvard, which started to require them in 1935. In 1969 Bowdoin college was the first to adopt a test-optional policy, followed by other liberal arts colleges such as Bates in 1984. This policy was not adopted by a critical mass of institutions until the early 2000s, such that, just before the pandemic of 2020, approximately 47 percent of colleges and universities had gone test-optional. During the 2020 pandemic, over 90 percent of colleges and universities decided to make SATs optional or did not consider them at all. However, as of April 2025, a growing list of public, private, and Ivy League schools have decided to reinstate the SATs as a requirement for college admissions, despite evidence of the SATs’ racial and class-based bias.
In essence, colleges and universities have rebranded the SATs, an artifact of eugenics ideology, as a meritocratic tool to justify why the children of the white bourgeoise deserve to be at elite institutions of higher education, and why they deserve to get the jobs that pay the most money. When there are mechanisms in place that systematically limit the ability for Black students to attend and graduate from college, these barriers play a de facto role in perpetuating racial capitalism.
In tandem with the SATs, white elites created legacy admissions, the special preference given to the relatives of alumni, to prevent or at least limit the matriculation of Jewish students at Harvard, who, like Black Americans then and now, were considered “racial undesirables” in the 1920s United States. Selective private institutions are more likely to consider legacy status than public institutions, so this policy disproportionately benefits students from economically privileged backgrounds.
Unsurprisingly, none of the arguments put forth for why colleges and universities continue to use legacy admissions relate to “merit.” In fact, non-legacies at Harvard, for example, outperform legacies in every category except athletics. And, despite a general consensus among 75 percent of Americans that the utilization of legacy admissions policies is an inequitable practice, there has not been the same intense public uproar or targeted legal battle to undermine it as there has been against the use of affirmative action in college admissions. Legacy admissions, like the SATs, help to keep the system of racial capitalism alive by ensuring that children of white elites get academic credentials from the most prestigious academic institutions, giving the false impression that they are the most competent and qualified. And, because college-educated individuals make, on average, higher salaries than those who do not attend college, a college degree is a gateway for economic success and upward mobility. In addition, graduates from more selective schools — those that are more likely to require SATs and utilize legacy admissions policies — have higher graduation rates and higher earnings in business and social science disciplines. Clearly, the SATs and legacy admissions practices are functioning exactly as intended — to keep “racial undesirables” from accessing higher education or relegating them to less prestigious and less resourced schools.
Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism
The relationship between anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in U.S. higher education institutions has roots that extend far beyond the early 20th century. A 2022 report published by the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery acknowledges that Harvard University presidents, faculty, staff, and students benefited from the labor of enslaved Black people from its founding in 1636 until it became illegal in Massachusetts in 1783. Harvard continued to benefit from slavery through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries through donors who accumulated their wealth from slave trading as well as through the coerced and unpaid labor of enslaved people on plantations in the American South and the Caribbean.
Harvard is not unique, as is evidenced in the 2013 book Ebony & Ivy written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and historian Craig Wilder. Wilder identifies several other Ivy League schools in the Northeast, such as Columbia, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth, that benefited from profits gained from the enslavement of Black people and the theft of their labor. What this historical context reveals, is that higher education institutions in the United States have played a significant role in perpetuating a system of racial capitalism rooted in anti-Blackness. This means that anti-affirmative action rhetoric is blatantly and intentionally ahistorical, and survives due in large part to an active investment in maintaining white ignorance.
Current anti–affirmative action and anti-DEI rhetoric are rooted in the same white supremacist and anti-Black racial ideologies and logics that fueled slavery-era racial capitalism in the United States. In June 2023, these were the ideological and rhetorical tools that the predominantly white and conservative Supreme Court used to dismantle affirmative action in college admissions.
In higher education institutions, the reframing of affirmative action as a program that makes it possible for unqualified Black students to take the place of qualified white ones is a convenient narrative that legitimizes gate-keeping systems designed to exclude Black students and other students of color from earning credentials that could lead to upward mobility. In the meantime, the children of white elite families continue to benefit from legacy admissions policies that give them an unfair advantage in college admissions. Unsurprisingly, despite evidence that both SATs and legacy admissions have racist roots and are biased against low-income students and students with minoritized racial identities, the Trump administration has yet to prioritize this as an inequitable practice that the administration should address to be consistent with their avowed commitment to a meritocratic society.
Media that fights fascism
Truthout is funded almost entirely by readers — that’s why we can speak truth to power and cut against the mainstream narrative. But independent journalists at Truthout face mounting political repression under Trump.
We rely on your support to survive McCarthyist censorship. Please make a tax-deductible one-time or monthly donation.