Republicans Aren't Done Blocking Black Students From Getting College Educations

It was a great week for evil before the 4th of July hit. Last week, the conservative front-loaded Supreme Court effectively killed affirmative action at colleges and choked out president Joe Biden's efforts to relieve student-loan debt.

Now, unsated by making tasty meals of sucking the blood from the country's disenfranchised (and mostly Black and Brown) young people, the party of old vampires is now going after scholarships meant to help even the playing field for minority students.

MSNBC reports that the Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos, has called laws allowing for minority undergraduate grants "discriminatory" and promised to introduce legislation to repeal them.

If this were one wingnut in the party talking bulls**t, that might be one thing, but Missouri is already acting on the Supreme Court's affirmative action decision, lumping in scholarships as part of the ruling. The University of Missouri school system is complying, releasing a statement that says in part, "As allowed by prior law, a small number of our programs and scholarships have used race/ethnicity as a factor for admissions and scholarships. Those practices will be discontinued, and we will abide by the new Supreme Court ruling concerning legal standards that applies to race-based admissions and race-based scholarships."

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The long holiday weekend and its accompanying hot-dog chomping and fireworks may have distracted the country for a few days, but make no mistake: The GOP is not resting and its newest target is minority college scholarships. Wisconsin and Missouri just tipped us off to a whole new part of the 2023 Republican playbook.