Life is tough for white people in America. A few hundred years of presumed superiority have left many of them psychologically unable to deal with failure, trapped in a cycle of victimhood where their own shortcomings can only be understood as evidence of persecution against them. So we have Abigail Fisher, 23 years old, and the plaintiff in Fisher v. University of Texas, which is currently being weighed by the Supreme Court.
Fisher, who is white, is suing the university because—well, because the full-time crusaders against affirmative action asked her to. But her ostensible complaint is that she applied to go to the University of Texas at Austin but didn't get in, while some students who are not white did get in, under the university's system of weighing "personal circumstances," including poverty and race, in some of its admissions. Ergo, under the logic of anti-reverse racism, some undeserving minority student took her spot.
But this week, Pro Publica published a look into the actual circumstances surrounding University of Texas admissions when Fisher applied. And that the reason Fisher didn't get in was that she wasn't qualified.
In response to earlier restrictions on affirmative action, Texas was already using a system under which, before it considered anyone's "personal circumstances," any student in the top 10 percent of his or her high school class was automatically admitted. Ninety-two percent of the slots at Austin were given out that way in Fisher's year. Fisher didn't get one of those spots. That means at least 10 percent of the students in her own high school had performed better than her, head to head.
This is the thing about anti-affirmative-action plaintiffs: They are drawn from the pool of white people who find themselves right around or below the cutoff point for admissions, despite the widely documented bias in favor of white people in the American system of educating, credentialing, and testing students. They are by definition mediocre. The good students get into the good schools.
But the white plaintiffs never complain about all the admissions spots that went to white people with higher grade-point averages and better SAT scores than theirs—spots that were just as available to them, if they had been able to earn the right credentials. So the issue in Fisher v. Texas is not the 92 percent of admission slots that Abigail Fisher could have gotten by being a better student in high school. It's the eight percent of slots that were left over.
Yet even for those, Pro Publica reports, Fisher and her backer Edward Blum can't say she was cheated because of her race:
[U]niversity officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.
It's true that the university, for whatever reason, offered provisional admission to some students with lower test scores and grades than Fisher. Five of those students were black or Latino. Forty-two were white.
Neither Fisher nor Blum mentioned those 42 applicants in interviews. Nor did they acknowledge the 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. Also left unsaid is the fact that Fisher turned down a standard UT offer under which she could have gone to the university her sophomore year if she earned a 3.2 GPA at another Texas university school in her freshman year.
So having failed to work hard enough in high school to get into the University of Texas directly, Fisher was unwilling to do the work to win a transfer slot there. When will white people stop wallowing in their victim status and put some effort into improving themselves, like regular Americans do? It will be a shame if the Supreme Court chooses to reward this kind of dysfunctional identity politics.