Colleges and universities may prove able to work around, to an extent, last week's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court against affirmative action admissions programs.
That would leave bogus right-wing rhetoric and the zeal of Republican state legislators as the ruling's more dire effects.
The Supreme Court left open the possibility that race could remain a factor in an admission system at a college committed to diversity as a key element of meaningful learning.
For example, a Black student's essay about overcoming the disadvantages of his race while growing up in his place could be a determining factor in admission.
That would go as well for a poor rural home-schooled white student's essay about overcoming the disadvantages of his circumstance. That, in theory, would be what would eliminate racial discrimination in such considerations.
The practice would be another thing.
The idea is that a college is better if its enrollment contains exceptional and eager young people bringing disparate circumstances to the higher-education experience.
What the ruling's fallout doesn't need--and here we can localize the topic--is Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and state Sen. Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro.
She made this statement after the ruling: "As Martin Luther King Jr. said, people should be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The Supreme Court affirmed that fundamental truth in today's decision. The greatness of America is that it doesn't matter where you start--you get to decide where you finish."
That's hardly her first egregious, tone-deaf misappropriation of fact.
This is what King said: "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." On another occasion, he said: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Note that he is looking to a day in one statement and dreaming for his children's future in the other. In neither is he remotely saying that the blessed circumstance of color-blindness and equal opportunity yet exists or will exist by the summer of 2023.
Affirmative action is about making concerted efforts to lift all race-disadvantaged children to equal or at least competitive opportunities. The time to end affirmative action would be when those concerted efforts have succeeded in full.
They haven't yet.
The rest of Sanders' misguided and insensitive statement requires mention. It still does, in fact, matter where one starts. And it is detached from reality to say everyone gets to decide where they'll finish.
A Black baby is born to an absentee father and an economically struggling mother living in a cycle of economic disadvantage and cultural deprivation in east Little Rock. The young man decides by 12 to do well.
But then his mom leaves with a new husband for points north and the young Black male moves into a barracks-style bedroom shared with his older, gang-member cousins in a grandparent's house.
A different decision has been made for him. He certainly did not choose or deserve where he finished.
If he somehow could have been saved to college-admission time, he'd have deserved special consideration.
As for Dan Sullivan, he's the book-banning, librarian-criminalizing state senator who put in a bill in the recent regular session to bar consideration of race or gender advantages at state and local governments and institutions of higher education.
He said the days of disadvantage and discrimination had ended and that it was time to let the strong survive.
His bill passed in the Senate but got stopped in House--even the Arkansas House.
He, or someone else of his ilk, will be back, armed with this Supreme Court ruling, arguing now with more muscle and momentum that it's time to stop mistreating some by favoring others.
That's the new right-wing refrain, you know--that those of us who advocate continuing concerted efforts to mitigate racial disadvantages are the real racists, or even the real white supremacists. It's that favoring affirmative action is calling Black people inferior.
That throws racial sensitivity on its head as surely as Sarah Sanders throws Dr. King's dreams of eventual healing on theirs.
Bill Clinton was right in the 1990s when he said "mend, don't end" affirmative action. This Supreme Court ruling is a whole lot more mending and closer to an ending than he envisioned. But it is narrow and incremental enough that it can be worked with in the continued interests of diversity, fairness and opportunities.
Some of these attitudes on the right can't be worked with. They can only be roundly and soundly rejected.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.