The Supreme Court yesterday decided another affirmative action case, once more holding that discrimination no longer exists.

When I discuss these things with people, I find that often the whole idea of affirmative action is misunderstood.

Affirmative action began as a way to fix discrimination where it needed to be fixed. Imagine a factory in an area that is 50% minority. If the jobs in the factory required no experience, you’d expect 50% of the employees to be minorities, wouldn’t you? Just based on statistics. Well, of course that wasn’t always the case, especially in the ’60s and 70s when affirmative action began. You’d have these places with 10% minority workers.

So what would happen is that the factory would have to explain themselves. If, for instance, they could show that of the job applications they received, only 10% were from minorities then perhaps that could explain it. But that usually didn’t happen. And so the factory was made to have a policy of accepting minorities to get to where they should have been had there been no discrimination.

Note: this never required you to hire someone who was not qualified. Never. Yet people who scream about “reverse discrimination” always try to give anecdotal examples of where that happened.

Most of the recent cases involve colleges, where there is a different objective. Colleges want to have a diverse student body. They like to get students from all over the country and all over the world, with different religions and beliefs and backgrounds and races. They also look to get people with different experiences and people who were leaders in their community.

It’s how you get a real education. Real education comes from getting lots of different viewpoints and not being in a room where everyone thinks exactly the same. (As an aside, I taught a Constitutional Law class for a semester at Curry College in Massachusetts back in the ’90s — the entire class was full of rich, spoiled white kids and I couldn’t get a good debate going no matter what the issue. It was terrible.)

Lawsuits often come from white kids who got better SAT scores but yet didn’t get in while a minority student whose scores weren’t so good did.

Are SAT scores everything? Do they predict future success? No, and all educators know that. They are an indication, but that’s just one of many factors to consider when accepting students. (Some schools now don’t even consider SATs when accepting students.)

Yet people scream “reverse discrimination” and only look at race when a minority person gets in over a white person. (For all you know, the minority applicant was an Eagle Scout who was High School President, plays a musical instrument, knows three languages, but tests poorly.)

And now we get back to the main point again — qualifications. Even if the minority student is not as qualified as the white student, he or she is still qualified. They’ve met the minimum requirement to get in, and once in, they will have to take the same tests and do as well as every other student or they will fail.