Bakke was rejected for age and interviews yet blamed affirmative action for his rejection

Evidence

While racist Blacks blamed Black politicians—and increasingly Black capitalists—for their socioeconomic struggles, racist Whites blamed Black people and affirmative action for their struggles in the 1970s. Racist ideas put all of these Americans out of touch with reality—as out of touch as one White male aerospace engineer who wanted to be a doctor. Allan Bakke was over thirty-three when the medical school at the University of California at Davis turned him away a second time in 1973, citing his “present age” and lukewarm interview scores as the main factors in the rejection. By then, more than a dozen other medical schools had also turned him away, usually because of his age. In June 1974, Bakke filed suit against the University of California Regents—the body that had fired Angela Davis four years earlier. He did not allege age discrimination. He alleged that his medical school application had been rejected “on account of his race,” because UC Davis set aside sixteen admissions slots out of one hundred for “disadvantaged” non-Whites. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1063

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my testing goal: here is a concrete case where a racist idea (quota discrimination) is adopted to explain a rejection that was actually about age — the reverse direction from Kendi’s canonical policy-first sequence requires scrutiny.