Racial Classifications, Other Factors, and the Equal Protection Clause
Race, however, can no longer be the sole basis for granting preferences and other factors must be considered in the admissions process. This provides an interesting parallel for racial profiling cases. More specifically, a profiling procedure or practice based solely on race would seem to offend both the spirit of the American constitution and the specific intent of the language contained in the Equal Protection Clause.
A profiling procedure or practice, on the other hand, which lists race simply as one factor among many such as age, location, and time might better harmonize the burdens imposed by racial classifications in the racial profiling context with the preferences extended by racial classifications in the affirmative action context.
The practical problem, in both contexts, is whether fallible human beings of whatever political persuasion are capable of viewing race as one of many factors rather than being a dispositive factor. The United States Supreme Court, to be sure, cannot create overarching legal and ethical standards that account for personal prejudices and individual bias.
Racial classification schemes will therefore always be substantially weakened by the fact that people can abuse what might otherwise be a superficially reasonable framework in which race is one of many considered factors.
The only real way to eliminate these particular problems is to resort to a more literal interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in which all people are equally entitled to the protection of the laws and in which neither preferences nor burdens should ever be predicated on racial classifications.
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