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82 Top U.S. Firms, Civil Rights Groups Show United Support
By Jennie L. Ilustre
Why are the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings this October of great concern to all Americans, including Americans of Asian ancestry?
Reason: The Supreme Court will once again decide on issues that will affect the daily lives not just of the present generation of all Americans, but of future generations as well. And it is doing so in a year with its increasingly politicized atmosphere.
As a CNN story on “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace” notes, among the issues the nation’s highest court will tackle from October 3 are “voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty – areas where the solid conservative majority can easily control the outcomes.” The current Supreme Court is composed of 6 conservatives and 3 liberals.
CNN’s Wallace interviewed former Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired early this year, on his program’s September 23 debut broadcast.
Breyer “bemoaned his position in the court’s minority liberal bloc during his final year on the bench,” according to the story by Devan Cole. He talked about “the court’s controversial decision in June to reverse Roe v. Wade.” Abortion rights had been in the nation’s laws for 50 years.
Regarding one of the lawsuits in the Supreme Court’s docket this year, top advocate John C. Yang stressed in an email what is at stake: “The upcoming oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court are going to be pivotal in upholding the more than 40-year legal precedent of affirmative action.”
Yang is the President and Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Asian American Justice Center (Advancing Justice–AAJC). It is based in Washington, D.C. with affiliates across the nation.
He added: “Two-thirds of the Asian American community are in full support of affirmative action policies. The majority of Americans are in favor of these policies that increase access to educational opportunities. Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC firmly believes and supports holistic admissions policies that help address systemic and racial barriers to education that continue to impact Asian American, Latinx, and Black students.”
Historic Support
Last August, In a show of historic and overwhelming support for affirmative action, 82 of the nation’s top corporations and business groups signed three amicus briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina.
They urged the Court to uphold over 40 years of precedent allowing colleges and universities to consider race as one of the many factors in admissions.
A major theme of their three amicus briefs is that Affirmative Action affects the nation’s future, and that “a diverse workforce enables our businesses to remain competitive in the global economy.”
(Amicus curiae, Latin for friend of the court, according to Britannica, refers to “one who assists the court by furnishing information or advice regarding questions of law or fact”…who is not a party to a lawsuit, but who has a direct interest in its outcome, “and is therefore permitted to participate as a party to the suit.”
In November 2020, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in a 104-page decision a trial court’s judgment that Harvard’s holistic, race-conscious admissions program is legal and permissible.
The corporations submitting the amicus briefs urged the Supreme Court to affirm that decision pursuant to long-standing precedent.
The group includes businesses that submitted briefs to the Supreme Court in support of race-conscious admissions almost 20 years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger, as well as new companies that did not exist then.
The companies signing onto the amicus briefs account for over 5.5 million employees worldwide and more than $3.2 trillion of annual revenue. (A complete list is at the bottom of this story.)
Legal Defense Fund
In a statement, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law said they “are proud to stand with 82 leading corporations and business groups from a wide variety of industries and areas across the country in reaffirming to the Supreme Court that the economy derives direct benefits from employees educated in diverse settings.”
Michaele Turnage Young, Senior Counsel at Legal Defense Fund (LDF) told Asian Fortune: “This lawsuit is a Trojan horse; it exploits genuine concerns about discrimination against Asian Americans in our society and uses them as a vehicle to eliminate the consideration of race, as one of many factors, in college admissions.
“Doing so would hinder colleges’ ability to control for the unfair, detrimental effect of racial discrimination on applicants’ PK-12 educational experiences, which unfairly places the hopes and dreams of many hardworking Black, Latinx, Native American, Asian American, and Pacific Islander students and their families out of reach.”
Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation’s first civil rights law organization. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative.
Why Affirmative Action Matters
The 82 businesses support the role of higher education in training the nation’s future leaders and workforce. Their three amicus briefs assert that Affirmative Action benefits the country, and that “a diverse workforce enables our businesses to remain competitive in the global economy.”
- As noted in the amicus brief on behalf of major American business enterprises: “‘[S]trong evidence’ spports the insight, confirmed by Amici’s experience, that university students who study and interact with diverse peers, and particularly with racially and ethnically diverse peers, exhibit enhanced cognitive development necessary for a wide range of skills highly valued in today’s economy …
Students of all racial backgrounds benefit from diverse university environments…Building a diverse classroom experience is how to turn out the most informed critical thinkers. Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.”
- A second amicus brief filed by major American science and technology companies emphasizes the continuing importance of race-conscious, holistic university admissions practices to the competitiveness of the science and technology field.
The brief explains that: a) a racially diverse pipeline of graduates in disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is essential to the success of science and technology companies; b) racial diversity improves scientific endeavors and the innovation of new technologies; c) a racially diverse workforce helps guard against the possibility that science and technology companies will be out of touch with their increasingly diverse and global customer base; and d) a racially diverse workforce helps STEM companies recruit and retain talent.
As the science and technology companies note in their brief: “For science and technology companies to achieve…competitive advantages, universities must admit racially diverse classes of students and foster inclusive cultures…[C]ompanies whose workforces are racially and otherwise diverse will be better equipped to identify and address any number of scientific and technological challenges…
“Tech companies work on unconventional questions that require creative solutions, and diverse groups consistently outperform homogenous groups on exactly that type of problem solving.”
- A third amicus brief was filed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Aeris Communications, Inc. (Aeris), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Stanford University.
It “underscores the importance of diversity not just within higher education or the corporate world at large, but in the particular cross-section of academia and industry within the intensely collaborative, and increasingly global, STEM industries.”
As IBM, Aeris, MIT, and Stanford explain, “Not only does diversity promote better outcomes for students in STEM, it contributes to better science. As such, American businesses at the forefront of innovation in STEM depend on the availability of a diverse cross-section of talented graduates from the nation’s most rigorous and elite institutions.”
Corporate signatories to amicus briefs supporting Affirmative Action (in alphabetical order)
Accenture, Adobe Inc., Aeris Communications, Inc., Air Products & Chemicals, Inc.,Airbnb, Inc., Alaska Airlines, Inc. American Airlines, Inc., American Express Company, American International Group, Inc., Amgen Inc., Apple Inc., Applied Materials, Inc., Ariel Investments, LLC;
Bain & Company, Bayer US LLC, Biogen Inc.,Bristol Myers Squibb,Chamber of Progress,Cigna Corporation Cisco Systems, Inc., Corning Incorporated, Corteva Agriscience, Cruise LLC, Cummins,Inc.;
Dell Technologies, Inc., Dupont de Nemours, Inc. Eaton Corporation,Engine Advocacy,Etsy, Inc.,General Dynamics Corporation, General Electric Company, General Motors Company, Gilead Sciences, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline LLC Google LLC;
HP Inc. International Business Machines Corp., IKEA Retail US,Illinois Tool Works Inc.. Intel Corporation, Jazz Pharmaceuticals PLC, JetBlue Airways, Johnson & Johnson,Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. KPMG LLP;
Leidos Holdings, Inc. Levi Strauss & Co.,LinkedIn Corp.,Logitech Inc.,Lyft, Inc.; Mastercard, MatchGroup, LLC, Mattel, Inc. Merck & Co., Inc. Met Platforms, Inc.,Micron Technology, Inc. Microsoft Corp.; Northrop Grumman Corporation, Paramount Global, PayPal Inc. Pinterest, Inc. Procter & Gamble Company, RealNetworks, Inc., Red Hat, Inc. Ripple Labs Inc., Salesforce, Inc., Shell USA, Inc., Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Starbucks Corporation Steelcase Inc.;
The Hershey Company, The Kraft Heinz Company, The Prudential Insurance Company of America,Twilio Inc., Uber Technologies, Inc., United Airlines Inc., Verily Life Sciences LLC, Verizon Services Corp., ViiV, Healthcare Company, VMware Inc., Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. and Zazzle Inc.
