Justices will consider next week whether to end affirmative action in cases challenging policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University.
While Polanco, 29, a Latina social justice activist born to immigrant parents from El Salvador, supports affirmative action policies, Westhill, 36, a Black conservative who served in the administration of former President Donald Trump, is adamantly opposed.
Westhill runs a conservative organization in Washington called the Center for Equal Opportunity that advocates against racial preferences. He thinks his UNC degree was tarnished by the university’s admissions policy, because it could create the false impression that he was admitted because of his race. His group has filed a brief backing the challengers at the Supreme Court.
Polanco and Westhill's contrasting views on the university's efforts to atone for its past practices reflects how affirmative action, introduced to redress historic discrimination, has been a contentious issue for decades, strongly supported by educational institutions and corporate America as vital to fostering diversity and condemned by conservatives as antithetical to the notion that racial equality means that all races are treated the same.
Blum's lawyers have asked the justices to overturn a 2003 ruling on Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the court said race could be considered as a factor in the admissions process because universities had a compelling interest in maintaining a diverse campus. The legal debate on the issue had already raged for decades before that and was left unresolved by a fractured 1978 Supreme Court ruling in which the justices prohibited racial quotas but left the door open to some consideration of race.