The Department of Justice’s civil rights division was once known as the crown jewel of the agency, but under Trump it has become just another tool of this administration’s politicized and racialized attacks targeting Black, Latino and other people of color.
The latest examples are the sham findings of discrimination the division issued against the medical schools of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Yale University for admitting high-achieving Black and Hispanic students. The administration is cynically wielding its anti-discrimination authority to tear down civil rights advances at the cost of equal educational opportunity.
In its findings, the justice department claimed the grades and test scores of Black and Hispanic admitted applicants were less competitive than those of white and Asian admits and said the schools intentionally discriminated against white and Asian applicants. But the justice department’s conclusions overstate the difference in scores between applicants and ignore other applicant data completely, including student transcripts, letters of recommendations and essays.
The differences among GPAs and test scores – one standard deviation or less – were too small to be legally or statistically significant and may be explained by random factors unrelated to race. Comparatively, two standard deviations is the commonly accepted threshold that federal courts and social scientists consider statistically significant in racial discrimination cases.
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