Letters to the Editor | July 5, 2023

The Sixers arena is not yet here. Yet in anticipation, the Greyhound bus station moved from Filbert Street to Market Street. If you watch the mayhem that this has caused in the area, you know that the proposed arena bodes bad news for the city’s tourism industry. I live in Old City, and traffic in this area the last couple of days, particularly around the new “bus station” (there is no place to sit and people have to wait outside for their bus), has caused significant delays, traffic woes, and disruptions in visitors’ mobility. The city must revisit the impact on our tourism, which surely brings more people from near and far than occasional games at the arena might.

Hanna Shapira, Philadelphia

When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the consideration of race in college admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts said that “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as the discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” Roberts is assuming that high school students will have an insightful understanding of how race has impacted their life — how race has affected what neighborhood they live in, their financial means, their school’s resources, their health, and the culture in which they were raised.

Fine. Yet these are all topics that right-wing conservatives are anxious that teachers do not discuss — i.e., the pernicious effects of systemic racism — how redlining created segregated and often depressed neighborhoods, how the resulting disparity in housing values affected school resources, how discrimination continues to affect career prospects, earnings, and health.

Admissions officials already understood these effects, but now they are supposed to ignore what they know unless a student explicitly writes about it in his or her essay? It seems ironic that at just the time that we’re expecting Black and brown students to be articulate about these subjects, the right is interfering with lessons that would help students to learn about these connections and to appreciate the impact they may have had on their lives.

Jean V. Smith, Media, jean.v.smith86@gmail.com

During the civil rights era, Southern politicians claimed that the movement was led by communists. In a similar vein, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that affirmative action was “illegal social engineering” by liberals, who he has often claimed to be radical socialists. In making such a claim, he completely ignores the reason for affirmative action to begin with, and the history of racist policies that make it necessary. Such admissions policies were not a zero-sum game that disadvantaged white students. Meritocracy, which the GOP leader advocates, is another form of racial discrimination that makes it hard for Black students to get into colleges. McConnell treated President Barack Obama with greater animosity than he has President Joe Biden and made efforts to sabotage any of his policies, even ones he previously agreed with, such as the Affordable Care Act, which was advocated for by the Heritage Foundation. Perhaps McConnell applauds doing away with affirmative action because if it was done earlier, or not at all, Obama would not have been president.

George Magakis Jr., Norristown

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