The six right-wing Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have continued their rampage with the gutting of Affirmative Action. Last week they ruled that considering race in the college admissions process was unconstitutional, effectively ending the practice of affirmative action.
This Court decision is white supremacy in action, as the six justices carry out the objectives of the White nationalists who placed them there. How so? Some readers may ask.
First, White Supremacists deny the existence of systemic racism, and second, they stand against efforts to minimize, if not eliminate, racist practices (since they argue that none exist).
This is what the Supreme Court just did in the rulings against affirmative action. They denied the effects of race-based disparities in American society and abolished affirmative action, a modest means of addressing them.
By declaring that it was time to end the affirmative action permitted by the Gutter decision two decades earlier, Justice Roberts and the other five right-wing justices argue that racial discrimination and its effects no longer exist.
Chief Justice Roberts has long opposed two major race-based remedies—affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. He led the mostly gutting of VRA and now the elimination of affirmative action.
In 1965, in a commencement speech at Howard University—which I attended—President Johnson laid out his ideas for what became Affirmative Action. He said, “If two men are running a race and one of them has a ball and chain around his ankle, and he is there at the starting line fussing with that ball and chain while his opponent is halfway around the track running like mad, you can’t cut those chains off and say, ‘now you’re free, you’re free and equal, run the race.’ That’s not fair,” said Johnson. “That’s not fair; the other man’s halfway around the track. So, somehow, we got to start them at the same place or get this fellow up where he can catch up with the other man (emphasis added), then say run the race as equals.”
This idea, of course, was disputed by Roberts-written decision. In her dissent, Justice KetanjiBrown Jackson attacked the whitewashing of racism in that decision. She wrote: “History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark.”
My discipline issued a strong and appropriate statement against the Court’s decision: “The American Sociological Association disagrees vigorously with the majority opinion and the reasoning behind it given that the accumulation of disadvantages based on race throughout American history cannot be undone without proactive policies and practices aimed at rectifying past discrimination and exclusion.”
Justice Clarence Thomas expressed one of the long-held problematic ideas against affirmative action in his concurring opinion. “This is not 1958 or 1968,” he said. “Today’s youth do not shoulder the moral debts of their ancestors,” I beg to differ.
In the 1980s, an African American lawyer sued the city of Milton, Massachusetts, after being harassed by police officers as he sat in his car in a primarily upscale White neighborhood waiting for his daughter, who was visiting a White friend. My family and I arrived in Milton just in time to have our city taxes contribute to the $400,000 judgment the African American Lawyer won from the city. By Justice Thomas’ figuring, my family should not have to contribute to the payment of the money owed because we were not there when the incident occurred. But that is not the way these things work.
Further, proof of the White Supremacist Anti-Black action is the grotesque part of the Court ruling that exempts military academies from this ban on Affirmative Action. Apparently, it is okay to have an affirmative action “leg up” to die for the Country but not to live and work in the Country.
