Racial Misdirection: How Anti-Affirmative Action Crusaders Use Distraction And Spectacle To Promote Incomplete Conceptions Of Merit And Perpetuate Racial Inequality

Despite the marginal success that anti-affirmative action groups have had at paring back the use of race in college admissions practices, affirmative action has remained largely in-tact as a tool to promote diversity on college campuses. But what might happen if "diversity"-the very thing that heretofore has protected affirmative action-was used instead as proof of its supposed unfairness? In this paper, focusing on the Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard case, we will employ Political Spectacle Theory to analyze the strategies and tactics used by the anti-affirmative action groups to distract from their real aims and to divert focus away from mitigating structural inequality.