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| The Supreme Court Turns ‘Equal Protection’ Upside Down | The Supreme Court Turns ‘Equal Protection’ Upside Down |
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| In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure. | In striking down affirmative action in higher education on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority said it had to do so because the Constitution forbids any form of racial distinction. With a single opinion, the justices overturned decades of precedents that upheld race-conscious admissions policies as consistent with the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and ignored the reality of modern America, where prejudice and racism endure. |
| As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the decision cements “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” | As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, the decision cements “a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” |
| The result of Thursday’s decision means the end of a system that provided decades of opportunity for thousands of students who might otherwise have been turned away from some of the nation’s biggest colleges and universities. The effects will be felt nationwide, and soon. In states that have already banned affirmative action in higher education, the percentage of Black students has dropped, in some cases dramatically. Black enrollment at the University of Michigan was 4 percent in 2021, down from 7 percent in 2006, before Michigan voters prohibited the consideration of race in college admissions. The story is similar in California, despite that state’s intensive efforts to recruit more minority students by other means. | The result of Thursday’s decision means the end of a system that provided decades of opportunity for thousands of students who might otherwise have been turned away from some of the nation’s biggest colleges and universities. The effects will be felt nationwide, and soon. In states that have already banned affirmative action in higher education, the percentage of Black students has dropped, in some cases dramatically. Black enrollment at the University of Michigan was 4 percent in 2021, down from 7 percent in 2006, before Michigan voters prohibited the consideration of race in college admissions. The story is similar in California, despite that state’s intensive efforts to recruit more minority students by other means. |
| That this ruling has been long anticipated does not change the context in which it was handed down. For the second time in just over a year, the Supreme Court tossed out a longstanding precedent intended, however imperfectly, to expand basic rights and freedoms to a large group of Americans who had suffered under a legal system that treated them as second-class citizens. Last year it was women seeking the constitutional right to have an abortion; this year it is chiefly Black and Latino students who want a shot at the economic opportunity that can come from a college degree. | That this ruling has been long anticipated does not change the context in which it was handed down. For the second time in just over a year, the Supreme Court tossed out a longstanding precedent intended, however imperfectly, to expand basic rights and freedoms to a large group of Americans who had suffered under a legal system that treated them as second-class citizens. Last year it was women seeking the constitutional right to have an abortion; this year it is chiefly Black and Latino students who want a shot at the economic opportunity that can come from a college degree. |
| Why now? Nothing has changed in either case — not public opinion, not the underlying facts, not even the behavior of the two schools targeted in the court’s decision, which were both following the guidelines the Supreme Court set out in a previous ruling on affirmative action in 2003. | |
| Only one thing has changed: the court’s membership. With their supermajority now firmly in charge, the Republican-appointed justices have had free rein to upend swaths of American law in order to achieve long-held goals of the conservative movement. Ending any form of racial consideration has long been high on that list, part of a continuing effort to pretend that racial inequality no longer exists — what Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described in her dissent as a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the role of race in daily life. |