If asked, almost every American would answer instantly: “Racial discrimination is wrong.” It’s one of the few moral propositions that seems to unite the country. Put it to a vote, and it would pass by a slam-dunk landslide.
But the devil is in the details.
Ask the next question -- “Why is racial discrimination wrong?” -- and the consensus begins to crack. Is it wrong because using race as a category is in itself illegitimate? Or is it wrong only when the “wrong” race is preferred, meaning there might be such a thing as “good” racial discrimination? Is it the act of dividing people by race that’s the problem, or just the motives behind it?
This is not an abstract debate. It goes to the heart of current fights over affirmative action, diversity hiring, and gerrymandered congressional districts.
Color-Blind vs. Color-Conscious
Justice Clarence Thomas raised the issue two years ago in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that struck down race-based admissions.
For decades, the ideal was a color-blind society -- one where, as Martin Luther King dreamed, people were “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Or, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007): “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But that view now competes with an opposite theory: that the way to end racial discrimination is not to ignore race, but to focus on it relentlessly. In this vision, eliminating discrimination means actively favoring certain groups -- giving them a “leg up” because of their race. That this inevitably means disadvantaging others is dismissed as unfortunate but acceptable “collateral damage.”
Harvard, Smoke, and Mirrors
The Harvard decision was a step toward restoring color-blindness to American law. Yet many schools immediately looked for ways to evade it. “Holistic” admissions suddenly became even more opaque, as administrators searched for “race proxies” to achieve the same outcomes under a different name.
They had little to fear from the Biden administration, which showed no interest in enforcing the ruling. It took the Trump administration’s renewed commitment to challenging reverse discrimination -- often dressed up as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” -- to start changing the landscape.
The question Justice Thomas raised in the Harvard case -- can there ever be such a thing as “good” racial discrimination? -- is now spilling into another arena: politics.
Race and Redistricting
The current battle over congressional redistricting in Texas and the rhetoric in Washington is partly driven by the fact that some districts were deliberately engineered to be “majority minority.” The intent was not subtle: to tilt the odds toward electing representatives of a particular race or ethnicity.
Democrats defend this as a triumph of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The VRA forbids “diluting” minority voting strength, and for decades federal courts treated this as a mandate to create racially gerrymandered districts.
But here’s the problem: if it’s illegal to discriminate based on race, why is it legal -- indeed, required -- for states to discriminate based on race when drawing political maps?
For years, the courts winked at this contradiction. The Trump administration challenged it, arguing that race-conscious districting is just as wrong as race-conscious college admissions. The principle is the same: the government is sorting people by ancestry.
The Myth of “Good” Discrimination
Proponents insist this kind of discrimination is different because it’s “remedial.” They claim it corrects historic injustice. But the moral flaw remains: the state is deciding how much political power you get based not on your citizenship or your community, but on your race.
If using race to decide who gets into Harvard is wrong, why is using race to decide who gets a seat in Congress acceptable? Do we want a color-blind society, or a society that is color-blind only in certain cases?
Let’s be honest: no one designs “majority minority” districts expecting them to produce conservative Republicans. These seats almost always go to very liberal Democrats. Racial gerrymandering is as much about partisan advantage as it is about supposed “fairness.” For years, Republicans foolishly played along.
A Personal Case Study
In the 1990s, New Jersey Democrats decided my congressional district needed a guaranteed Hispanic representative. My central Jersey town was awkwardly stitched together with towns 25 miles up the Turnpike near the Lincoln Tunnel. In the process, it skipped over nearby communities we shared businesses, schools, and history with.
The goal wasn’t to keep coherent communities together -- it was to manufacture a racial outcome. Some voters became more important than others simply because of their ethnicity. And when the plan worked, the racial gerrymander was proudly touted as “fairness.” It produced the Rt. Dishonorable Robert Menendez, who later advanced to the U.S. Senate before moving this year to his current seat at Allenwood Low Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania.
But fairness it was not. It was a calculated racial sorting of voters, dressed up in moral language.
Bantustans, American-Style
This kind of mapmaking produces political bantustans -- the special jurisdictions apartheid South Africa created to corral blacks while maintaining white control. The motives may differ, but the method -- assigning people to political spaces based on ancestry -- is the same.
We outlawed de jure Jim Crow sixty years ago. Yet we continue to let race dictate government decisions in the name of “equity” or “representation.” This keeps America locked in a color-conscious mindset, where citizens are competitors in a zero-sum racial game.
The Principle at Stake
If we truly want to get race out of American life, we must stop using race as a basis for making decisions -- whether in admissions, hiring, contracting, or districting. There is no morally clean version of racial discrimination. You cannot fix the wrongs of discrimination by engaging in more of it.
America must choose. Either we embrace a genuine color-blind ideal, where laws and opportunities apply equally to everyone without regard to skin color, or we keep the current double standard, where race is ignored when it benefits one group and emphasized when it benefits another.
The first choice leads toward unity. The second guarantees perpetual division.
Until we have the courage to apply that principle consistently, we will remain a society that talks about equality but practices hierarchy -- sorted, labeled, and divided by the very thing we claim to reject. It’s time we finally embraced the ideal of a society that judges people or apportions benefits on “the color of their skins.”
Image: Public Domain