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| Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the conservative majority. |
OPINION
Even though the US Supreme Court's ruling overturning affirmative action was expected, it didn't lessen the anger that still rose up Thursday morning. I'm furious.
The Supreme Court released their decision Thursday saying that Harvard's admission policy discriminated against Asian students applying to the school and ruled that the University of North Carolina's use of race to achieve a diverse student body was against the Constitution.
The vote was 6-3 in the complaint against UNC with the conservative justices in the majority. In Harvard's case, the vote was 6-2 with Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recusing herself because she was until, recently, a member of Harvard’s board of overseers.
The complaints against both schools was filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a questionable group headed by anti-affirmative action activist Ed Blum, who has been trying to end the policy for decades. In the case against Harvard, SFFA claimed that the school's affirmative action policy discriminated against Asian American applicants, who never showed up in court to testify.
The gist of the SCOTUS rulings was that schools could not use race as a factor in evaluating students applying for admission.
Personally, race helps define who I am. People who say they are color-blind -- and that includes the six conservative justices -- don't see me. The SCOTUS majority is saying my life experiences as a Filipino American does not matter.
To be clear, in the cases of Harvard and UNC, race is simply one of many factors used in evaluating student applicants, much like family income, a GPA, test scores and extra-curricular activities are factors. To say race doesn't matter, the Court erases a major part of my life story that forms my world view, my personality, my values. To say race doesn't matter, the Court majority says I don't matter.
FYI: Read the US Supreme Court ruling.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the two women of color on the Court and both beneficiaries of "affirmative action" programs, in their scathing dissenting views, say it better than I can.
Sotomayor warned the decision will have a "devastating impact" on the United States. The SCOTUS majority's "vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored."
In the Harvard case, Sotomayor wrote “that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions,” the Court basically “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Sotomayor, a Puerto Rican who grew up in low-income housing projects and benefited from affirmative action policy herself, wrote in defense of the UNC admission policy of using race as one of several factors in evaluating student applicants to the public university.
"The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored," she wrote. "Despite the Court’s unjustified exercise of power, the opinion today will serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound."
Jackson's no less fiery dissent of the UNC ruling, was a masterclass in the history of racism and affirmative action. Her dissenting opinion will likely be used in educating future lawyers.
"Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well documented “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry," writes Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.
Jackson continues: “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, on Thursday, 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.”
“If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.”
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