“The View” co-hosts on Wednesday accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of “not understanding diversity” due to his opposition to affirmative action.
The panel claimed that affirmative action, which the Supreme Court may be on the cusp of overturning, is a necessary pathway for racial minorities and women to go to college. They also accused Thomas of overlooking the importance of diversity on a college campus.
“What does Clarence Thomas say, he doesn’t understand diversity? He’s married to a white woman,” co-host Joy Behar said, referring to Ginni Thomas. “Isn’t that diversity?”
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg then claimed that Thomas is only focused on race, rather than other aspects of diversity. Co-host Sara Haines argued that admissions offices consider other factors, such as whether an applicant is a parent or veteran or would be a first-generation college student.
“[Race is] all this man is talking about,” Goldberg said. “That’s all he wants to bring up.”
The co-hosts all agreed that universities need to admit people from different backgrounds, including those they “don’t want to sit next to.” Goldberg said the U.S. is a country where the law has to force people not to exclude people of certain backgrounds.
“If you had left it alone, people would not have accepted people. Women would not have gotten into college,” she said. “There’s so much that would not have happened. It’s unfortunate that we have to have a law that says, ‘Listen, you have to take this into consideration.’ But that’s the country we live in. Sometimes, you have to push people and say, ‘Listen, all children should be educated equally.’ But they weren’t, so we had Brown v. Board of Education, we had to do stuff this way because people weren’t doing the right thing.”
The high court is in the midst of hearing oral arguments challenging race-based affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. An organization called Students for Fair Admissions filed two lawsuits that accuse the universities of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in the admissions process.
An 85 Fund poll released in September found that 59% of respondents disapprove of race-based affirmative action policies. Only 29% of the survey’s participants approve. Over half, 54%, are concerned that Asian Americans perform the highest on test scores but have the lowest rate of admissions. The poll surveyed 1,600 respondents between Sept. 14-18 with a 2.45% margin of error.