The End of Elite
In Post–Affirmative Action America, Black Exclusion Has Become a Feature, Not a Bug
As affirmative action recedes, a new purity test is taking hold. The absence of Black students is being quietly rebranded as evidence of fairness, and the same universities that once claimed the moral high ground are showing how quickly they will trade conviction to preserve their status. But perhaps the retreat of our institutions presents an opening. What if this is the moment to reimagine what merit, courage, and belonging should mean now—and which institutions have truly earned the right to call themselves elite?
The summer of 2023 announced a rupture in American life. In the span of two days, the Roberts Court ended race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC and struck down the Biden administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan. Together, the decisions made plain that a captured Court was intent on dismantling the very idea that structural inequality demands structural remedy—case by case, precedent by precedent.
The affirmative-action ruling attacked the legitimacy of race as an organizing principle for fairness. The student-loan decision extinguished hope for millions whose only route into the middle class ran through a prohibitively expensive, interest-bearing education. Together, the rulings made invisible the unequal conditions that define how we live and learn in America, and that remain most visible through race. They removed the system from the conversation, which was precisely the point.
And now, two years later, here we are.
In late October, the Associated Press published “Black Enrollment Is Waning at Many Elite Colleges After Affirmative Action Ban, AP Analysis Finds,” showing that Black student enrollment has dropped sharply across twenty of the nation’s most selective campuses. At Columbia, the share of Black freshmen fell from 20% to 13%—the steepest decline in the country. Harvard followed, dropping from 18% to 11.5%, and Princeton from 9% to 5%. Across the country’s most selective campuses, the story is the same: high prestige = a decline in the Black student population. The implicit argument behind the data is familiar: that without affirmative action, Black students simply cannot compete.
As expected, the story drifted across the country like ash—pushed through algorithms, picked up by the usual suspects, repackaged and regurgitated as if it offered fresh insight. It featured earnest and rightfully frustrated Black students watching their ranks decimated. But in the end, it was just another version of the same tired narrative we’ve been fed for generations: that the Mt. Everest of Black excellence is acceptance to elite, predominantly white institutions. Frankly, I still cringe each spring when I see the annual ritual of celebrating the lone Black student who got into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—or whatever the configuration. No other group is spotlit as routinely, as purposefully, or in such a paternalistic way. The lone Black students’ success is meant to signal to everyone that the system is fair, that the gates are open to any and all who are worthy, and, most of all, that acceptance into these particular institutions remains the holy grail.
What unsettled me about the AP piece wasn’t the data; I was disturbed by the unchallenged, underlying assumption that these universities remain worthy of nurturing Black ambition. There is no question: these institutions do open doors; they confer proximity and legitimacy; they provide access to brilliant educators. But what I’ve watched since 2023 has convinced me that elite has quietly become another word for compliant.
Take Columbia. It tops the AP list for the steepest decline in Black enrollment and also led the way in capitulation—dismantling its diversity programs, granting the feds access to admissions data, and agreeing to “monitor” programs the government deems suspect, all in exchange for money and the promise to cleanse itself of ideological radicals. Emory, UVA, UNC, Cornell—each, in different ways, followed, shuttering programs, sharing data and pledging to play ball. Harvard has chosen to fight back, though not in defense of inclusion but to preserve control of the vaunted Harvard seal.
Notwithstanding Harvard’s effort, what’s become painfully obvious is that the very institutions best positioned to defend rights are protecting endowments. Their leaders are not resisting unjust power; they are negotiating with it.
And yet we keep describing them as the apex of opportunity without acknowledging what that now means—to study and develop character in spaces that have signaled again and again that they will not protect us.
After years of doing what’s commonly called diversity work, I’ve learned that DEI, as practiced in most workplaces, fixates on diversifying faces, not frameworks. Many institutions—educational, corporate, even non-profit—rarely question their assumptions about worthiness. They want cosmetic, not conceptual, difference: Black and brown professionals who have already passed through the same filters of elite validation.
Even the “diversity of thought” crowd within these institutions—those who insist the real problem isn’t a lack of racial or gender representation but of ideological variety—still color inside the same elite-education lines when defining what counts as acceptable thought. Their version of diversity rarely extends beyond the familiar boundaries of credentialed respectability.
A few weeks ago, I clashed with a literary acquaintance who wrote a wildly irresponsible essay calling Karine Jean-Pierre—the first Black, first openly gay, and first immigrant to serve as White House press secretary—“the most unqualified person” ever to hold the role. He thought he was issuing an edgy political takedown, but I’ve noticed a familiar parlor trick among those eager to appear “balanced” and “reasonable”: publicly rebuking Black people to signal their open-mindedness—to prove they haven’t been brainwashed or browbeaten by what they imagine to be radical left orthodoxy.
I reached out to him personally to say that what he was really doing was reinforcing the same logic that drives these universities: that excellence exists only where white power has placed its seal of approval. Whatever one may think of her performance, the gauntlet Jean-Pierre had run to reach her position was remarkable, yet he felt perfectly entitled to anoint himself as a gatekeeper. Needless to say, he was furious with my feedback. Who was I to tell him anything? he shot back, before listing all the Black people he knew—as if having spoken to Cornel West gave him license to weigh in on a Black, gay, immigrant woman’s worthiness. I kid you not.
What my enraged acquaintance refused to entertain was that he was participating in a generations-old project of degrading Black people through race-neutral tropes like unqualified. Even as we witness the administration’s motorcade of mediocrity paraded before us on a daily basis—even as political insiders rush to get Mar-a-Lago makeovers so they can swim in the sewer’s deep end—he, like so many, clings to a world where whiteness remains the uncontested measure of merit.
And the truth is, he’s not alone. That same instinct—the need to protect the illusion of impartial excellence, to defend old hierarchies under the banner of fairness—animates our most revered institutions. It’s the reflex that keeps the gates closed and calls it rigor. It’s what allows universities to pantomime conviction as they bend the knee, insisting on “standards” that were never neutral to begin with.
This may sound harsh, and as my acquaintance said, who am I to speak, but it’s the quiet truth animating this entire moment. The rights rollback isn’t only about ending affirmative action or dismantling DEI. It’s about re-forging a symbolic link between whiteness and fairness, between exclusivity and order, so that the whiter an institution appears, the more credible it seems to the consumer. By the same token, the fewer of us there are, the more “pure” the institution appears—untainted by diversity, equity, and inclusion, untouched by what power calls “special treatment.” Under the guise of restoring merit, these “elite” schools are, perhaps unwittingly—though I doubt it—abetting the reconstruction of whiteness as virtue and Blackness as compromise.
Elite universities may insist they are merely following the law, but in doing so they align themselves with a new reputational marketplace in which the absence of Blackness is rapidly becoming a credential in itself: See? We may have capitulated with an authoritarian but at least we didn’t lower the bar. We’re still rigorous. We’re still elite!
It’s an impressive, if chilling, feat of narrative strategy. These institutions know that if the story being told is that “merit” has been restored, their value will hold—even if that merit is just exclusion repackaged. In Trump’s America, anti-Blackness has become the price of admission, and these schools are willing to pay it so long as it preserves their status.
We have built a culture that treats these universities like national treasures—too big to fail, too sacred to question. We rely on them as anchors of legitimacy, as if our collective worth depends on their survival. But whatever moral authority they once claimed has eroded in less than a year. Maybe the harder question isn’t why fewer Black students are enrolling, but why we keep calling these places elite. If eliteness means moral flexibility in defense of wealth and whiteness, the brand is already tarnished.
As I was thinking through this essay, I had coffee with a friend who said something that has stuck with me: the old definition of elite just isn’t enough to meet the current reality. It’s insubstantial. She’s right. We’re living in a time when nearly every assumption about power and legitimacy is being rewritten—about government, about the courts, about truth itself—and yet our idea of eliteness remains untouched. These were once institutions that claimed to stand for structural repair, that treated diversity as a virtue and inclusion as a measure of progress. That moral ambition was part of what made them elite.
But that’s not true anymore. Universities continue to rank and market themselves as though nothing has changed—performing the rituals of prestige, advertising selectivity as proof of excellence—without acknowledging that their mandate has been fundamentally altered. They have been constrained, curtailed, and, in many cases, complicit. Instead of confronting how their values have been hollowed out, they present the same old brand to the world, pretending the word elite still means what it once did.
In doing so, they participate in a larger sleight of hand. By continuing to assert their elite status under the new rules, they carry water for a movement that has made the exclusion of Black people the silent test of purity. This is the brilliance—and the danger—of narrative capture. It plants in the public imagination the idea that any institution where Black people belong must, by definition, be less than. And now, through rankings, media repetition, and institutional self-preservation, that lie is being retold every day by the very schools that once prided themselves on moral leadership.
None of this is a rebuke of the students and scholars—any and all, but especially Black and Brown—who still move through those halls. I have nothing but admiration for their brilliance and endurance. My beef isn’t with or about them. It’s with and about the architecture that demands they—we—keep proving our worth inside places first built to exclude, later softened to allow a few, and now quietly closing their doors once more. If my work has tried to do anything, it’s been to remind us that Black excellence has never been contained by institutions. It lives in our culture, our solidarity, our hunger, our humility, our resilience, and our imagination. These are the engines of our survival.
So what are we to do? If eliteness has become the new measure of anti-Blackness, our task is to replace it. To counter this narrative, we first have to start tracking the narrative. Call it what it is. When universities equate compliance with merit or journalists treat the absence of Black students as natural correction, name that as strategy, not inevitability.
Then we have to elevate narrative work. Artists, writers, educators, organizers—these are not peripheral actors as we have been led to believe. They are essential to democratic renewal. They shape the imagination through which policy becomes possible. We can’t keep outsourcing the story of who we are to economists or pollsters or strategists who a week ago were actively thwarted the people’s will in New York. We need an infusion of creative and moral energy—people who can see beyond the backward-looking measures of what once worked. Data like student enrollment at elite institutions once served as a useful accountability tool, a way to track progress toward equity. But the world has changed dramatically, and using yesterday’s metrics to measure today’s reality no longer makes sense. It isn’t an apples-to-apples situation. The futurists must step in now to help us imagine what comes next, to design new ways of knowing and measuring what truly matters.
And then we have to invest—in futurist thinking, yes, but also in the convening of people who are already experimenting with new forms of belonging. Some of this work is happening in pockets, but we need more of it, and with real resources behind it. The right has been deliberate in building its intellectual and narrative infrastructure; we must be equally deliberate in building ours. And we can’t do it in private, at closed door gatherings where only a few are invited to weigh in. The next story has to be imagined and built in full view.
That work of imagination is already beginning—in the movements for reparations, in the growing recognition that narrative itself is infrastructure. The stories we tell determine what we believe is possible. They shape how we understand power and who we believe deserves it.
We are living through something terrible and uncertain. We don’t know how this ends, what will remain, or what will have to be rebuilt. But we do know preserving and restoring what failed us when we needed it most should not be part of the plan.
As a parent of Black children who are just beginning their educational journeys—both more than a decade away from college—this isn’t abstract for me. I think about what story they’ll inherit about belonging and worth. I’m told, implicitly and explicitly, that the only way they’ll be seen as exceptional is if they pass through the gates of institutions that are teaching me, right now, how expendable we are.
If those schools have decided that protecting their brand matters more than protecting our presence, why should I send them my children?
Because when their time comes, we’ll be in a new era. This much is true. It will either be one where we pretend, as best we can, that nothing has been tainted, or it will be something entirely different, something we built together. Maybe in that new world, elite will mean courage. Maybe selectivity will be ours to define, measured by how bravely an institution stood when the test came.