The only two Black justices on the Supreme Court of the United States came to supremely different conclusions on the end of a decades-long statute that will affect how colleges and universities admit students of color for years to come.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas released their opinions in a court decision issued on Thursday, June 29, that effectively retires longtime affirmative action policies in college admissions, which means higher education institutions can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis of admission.
The justices ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina that the policy violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and is therefore unlawful. Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative activist group that challenges college admissions that use a racial component, had lost in lower federal courts with the two cases before Thursday’s ruling.
Chief Justice John Roberts expounded on the 6-3 conservative majority’s reasoning in the court’s opinion, stating that said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”
Thomas has been gunning for the end of affirmative action since 1991, the beginning of his time on the country’s highest bench. In a separate, concurring opinion, he called the policies “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”
“The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity. Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism,” Thomas wrote. “What, then, would be the endpoint of these affirmative…
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