Forty-five years and a day after one Supreme Court justice opened the door to race-based college admissions (the 1978 Bakke case), six justices closed it . The court has finally recognized that the Constitution prohibits such racial discrimination. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, “ending racial discrimination means ending all of it.” It’s unbelievable that it took until 2023 to do so, but sometimes the wheels of justice are slow.

Sometimes it also takes a while for the high court to coalesce around a position that long ago became startlingly obvious to anyone not steeped in judicial artifice or postmodern identity politics — which includes a majority of every American demographic group. That’s one important way in which the atmospherics of Thursday’s blockbuster ruling of the term is different from the Dobbs abortion case last year: Americans are genuinely split on abortion, whereas they overwhelmingly oppose racial preferences in admissions.

But this is only the beginning of the fight for equality in educational opportunity. Higher education grandees have long interpreted the court’s cautious approval of the temporary use of race (as one of many factors) as a green light for a permanent diversity-industrial complex. They will not go quickly into the colorblind night of merit-based admissions, but will fight for workarounds to maintain their system of racial spoils. So, there will be more litigation, but it’s clear that the Supreme Court has no more constitutional patience for admissions officers’ social engineering or university administrators’ DEI posturing.

And the majority anticipates those workarounds. Everyone from Harvard itself to your favorite Twitter troll (but I repeat myself) seized on the line that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” But nobody bothered to quote the next line, that “despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”

Look, Roberts is indisputably correct that colleges can legitimately consider applicants’ individual experiences with racial discrimination and other ways in which their racial and ethnic backgrounds may have affected their development as a human being — inasmuch as they consider individual experiences with any other types of adversity or personal growth. He’s also right that asking for and considering such adversity statements cannot be a pretext for engaging in the same kind of racial balancing as has happened under the sordid history of post-Bakke “holistic” review.

Still, many institutions will try to do exactly that, or to use ostensibly “race-neutral” alternatives that just happen to achieve very similar race-based admissions targets. That’s what states and municipalities did in their “massive resistance” to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. But we always knew that it would take more than one case, one victory, to root out the pernicious evil of racial preferences. And it may well be hard to engage in racialist tomfoolery without creating the sort of paper trail that will come out in discovery .

I’ve criticized the chief justice plenty in the past, and will continue to do so when he squishes out or engages in strategery on all sorts of issues. But today he secured his legacy. “Ending racial discrimination means ending all of it.” Indeed.

Ilya Shapiro is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of  Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court and the Shapiro’s Gavel Substack newsletter.