Reverse Discrimination Has a Definition:

A racial disparity may not be enough to prove discrimination. But deliberately trying to reduce that disparity may itself become evidence of discrimination.

That is the much bigger issue behind the Trump DOJ's new scrutiny of elite public high schools including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Lowell.

DOJ is examining whether admissions policies that appear race-neutral are actually being used to change racial outcomes.

Consider Stuyvesant: 777 students were admitted this year. Three were Black.

That disparity alone does not establish illegal discrimination.

But what happens if a school responds with poverty, neighborhood, hardship or other race-neutral criteria because it wants to broaden opportunity and racial representation?

That is where the legal line may be moving.

The post-SFFA regime could evolve from:

Government cannot sort individual people by race.

to:

Government may also be restricted from intentionally designing race-neutral policies to reduce racial disparities.

That creates the paradox:

Ignore the disparity, and it may not prove anything. Acknowledge it and deliberately try to reduce it, and your intent may become the problem.

At some point, that starts to smell less like colorblindness than legal gamesmanship designed to freeze the effects of existing racial barriers in place.

That is why this high-school fight is much bigger than admissions.

It could determine whether government is merely forbidden from treating people differently because of race, or increasingly forbidden from consciously trying to reduce racial inequality at all.