Primal Fear: A Critical Re-Analysis of Why Racial Minorities Really Feared Grutter, Gratz, and Fisher

This paper argues that race scholars have misunderstood the existential importance of Grutter v. Bollinger, Gratz v. Bollinger, and Fisher v. Texas. In their critical responses to these key Supreme Court decisions, they assumed wrongly that minorities, especially blacks, reacted politically, legally, and emotionally to Grutter and Gratz because they didn’t want a politically conservative Supreme Court to extinguished well before its time a vital jurisprudential principle that sought, through complex admissions algorithms, to counterbalance the present effects of past discrimination and the equal access and opportunities to higher education by all legal subjects. Based on this misunderstanding, these mostly legal scholars focused their analyses on why the Bakke principle remains relevant, especially due to extant racism and to gross differences in educational outcomes between whites and minorities. Hence, they presumed, again incorrectly, that minorities and women rallied to Bakke’s defense because, given the present-day need for corrective justice, they were defending the right of the oppressed to participate in race-plus admissions programs. In truth, these affected students were existentially rejecting arbitrariness, unfairness, and oppression, which by the Law of Attraction, they of course drew to themselves directly and indirectly. Unfortunately, they first experienced such oppression for example at home, in their childhood, by their parents or caregivers. Like this affected, statutorily protected class of students, these race scholars, whether Asian, black, Latino, white, or other, could easily misunderstand the existential and psychological etiology of these protests because they too are deeply unconscious, acting in a world in which they’ve compensated for what they didn’t receive as children, living in a world in which they place a determinative weight race and racial identity, and believing about a world that these constructs have real, objective, and existential value. It’s too bad that race and its identity do not have such inherent value. Race thus becomes not about experience but about moral precepts, which requires children to engage in at least two forms of forgetting: self-denial and self-deception, and they confess themselves as the lost of a child’s vitality, spontaneity, and authenticity. Regardless, the first requires children to suppress their real source of personal power, to wit, their Self-Awareness. The second demands that they pretend that they were beaten, humiliated, manipulated, and oppressed not by their parents or caregivers but by white racists and white structural oppression, the latter of which often gets expressed by blacks as the omnipresent “They.” Such denial and deception lead to self-betrayal, which is far more damaging than anything a white racist can do, and which requires them at the very least to know themselves through social constructs like race. Self-betrayal, even if unconscious, leads to bad faith, or lost authenticity. Fortunately, we forever receive intuitive promptings, which we deny to our ever-lasting disempowerment. Hence, in this paper, I argue that legal scholars missed the real, existential, and psychological genesis of the battle to save Bakke from what could be life-denying possibilities of Gratz, Grutter, and Fisher because they have not accounted for the impact of obedience training and rigid physical discipline, because children raised under such training and discipline privilege racial salvation through performance, which requires them to act like “black people,” because they fear retribution from their parents if they reject the moral concept of honor thy mother and father, and because such children at a very deep level have so suppressed their natural Potentia and Self-Awareness that they cannot imagine living without a legal norm through which they can express very poor proxies for who they think they are – not people with a strong identification with their Inner Being but simply “black people.”