From the New York Times news section:

Judge Strikes Down Elite Virginia High School’s Admissions Rules

Thomas Jefferson High School eliminated standardized tests and made other changes to attract more Black and Hispanic students. A judge declared the policy unfair to Asian Americans.

By Campbell Robertson and Stephanie Saul
Published Feb. 25, 2022

A federal judge on Friday struck down changes that had been made to the admissions process at a magnet school in Virginia that is one of the most prestigious high schools in the country, saying that the new rules left Asian American students “disproportionately deprived of a level playing field.”

The school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., which sits just outside of Washington, D.C., in Fairfax County, Va., had adopted the admissions protocols in late 2020 with the aim of diversifying the student body. The new rules did not mention race but eliminated a standardized testing requirement and specifically guaranteed eligibility to top students at middle schools that had sent few students to T.J. in the past.

After the rules went into effect, the percentages of Black and Hispanic students in the incoming class more than tripled, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 percent to 54 percent, the lowest share in years.

In changing the admissions process, school officials “expressed their desire to remake T.J. admissions because they were dissatisfied with the racial composition of the school,” Judge Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia wrote in his decision.

“A means to accomplish their goal of achieving racial balance,” he wrote, “was to decrease enrollment of the only racial group ‘overrepresented’ at T.J. — Asian Americans. The board employed proxies that disproportionately burden Asian American students.”

The decision comes as elite high schools across the country are embarking on plans to diversify their enrollment by race and income but are meeting with fierce pushback from many parents, including many Asian Americans.

Justin Driver, a Yale law professor, said it was “difficult to overstate the significance” of Judge Hilton’s decision, calling it “the latest and boldest indication yet that conservatives wish once again to offer radical reinterpretations of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.”

You have to offer an awfully radical reinterpretation of “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” to not realize that the 14th Amendment contains a secret invisible ink add-on reading in special code visible only to federal judges who have "grown in office" and now elicit Strange New Respect: “unless denying equal protection of the laws would benefit Blacks, power be upon Them.”

Mr. Driver, an expert on Supreme Court decisions affecting education, said the admissions plan at Thomas Jefferson High School was “plainly consistent with binding Supreme Court precedent.” But he said the judge’s ruling “has its eyes not so much on the most pertinent judicial decisions as the transformed composition of the current Supreme Court.”

Another interpretation is that it’s still A-OK to deny equal protection of the laws to whites, but not to white-adjacent non-whites, such as immigrant Asian parents exercising their hereditary right as Americans to have the American taxpayers pay for their children to be educated far from underclass blacks and Latinos instead of anteing up for private school like wimpy white parents do.

This ruling that not only Blacks but also Asians have civil rights raises the big question: Do whites have civil rights?

Say a different exam school was 73% white. Then, during the Racial Reckoning, the school board announces that to fight White Privilege, they are getting rid of the obviously Systemically Racist entrance exam on which whites do better than blacks on average, thus proving it must be biased. And then the white percentage drops to 54%. Would the Supreme Court rule that the Thomas Jefferson HS precedent also applies to white victims of denial of equal protection of the laws?

[Comment at Unz.com]