The Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions.
In Thursday's 6-3 decision (along ideological lines), the justices rejected arguments by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina that their admissions programs are warranted to ensure campus diversity.
The high court majority effectively overturned a 2003 decision, known as Grutter v. Bollinger, that had reaffirmed the right of universities to consider race as one of many admissions factors.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said that ruling “is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the ruling will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.
Specifically, The 14th Amendment ensures that individuals receive equal protection of the laws from state agencies including public universities, a standard that also applies to most private colleges that receive federal funding.
In general, the court has permitted racial preferences only to remedy specific acts of illegal discrimination, not compensate for general social injustices said to stem from historical practices.
The result of 'affirmative action' in admissions is nowhere more obvious than in the following chart (ironically sourced from VOX.com)
Does it really need SCOTUS to decide this? Of course, race should not be considered!
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
“And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies ‘without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality’—it is ‘universal in [its] application.'”
The court's three liberals dissented. Society "is not, and has never been, colorblind," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
"The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People."
The dissenters exclaimed that the court's conservative majority was "entrenching racial inequality in education."
"Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits," wrote Sotomayor.
"In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter."
But she was not done with her lambasting of the conservative majority's common sense interpretation of color-blindness being constitutional:
With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all" by legal fiat.
But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.
No one benefits from ignorance.
Although formal race- linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better.
The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism.
Brace for the snowflakes to unleash their hatred of this color-blind ruling...
...because not accepting race-based decision-making is, umm, racist?