The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on Thursday that race-conscious college admissions programs are unlawful was widely expected but still deeply discouraging.
The nation’s highest court, at its best a great protector of minority rights and equal access to education, now sides with those who want to narrow educational opportunities for minorities. It is a grim and bewildering turn away from of the court’s previous opinions and the nation’s long march toward equality.
The rulings come in two lawsuits brought by a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The complaint against Harvard focused on supposed discrimination against Asians who were not admitted despite academic records and test scores that exceeded others who were admitted. But it’s the 6-3 ruling against UNC that carries the most disturbing message of backtracking on the nation’s commitment to compensate for the sins of slavery and Jim Crow and the prejudice and economic disparities that still profoundly affect many Black people.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority thinks that the way to ameliorate racial bias is to stop acknowledging it. In an earlier opinion on school integration, Chief Justice John Roberts blithely wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But the view that “colorblindness” obliterates the legacy and daily realities of racial prejudice is a head-in-the-sand perspective.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissenting opinion in the Harvard case, “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” She added that the ruling “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
The campus at UNC-Chapel Hill, home of the nation’s oldest public university, was constructed in part by slaves and was long closed to Black students. The university has made great strides in the last half-century to balance that history with policies focused on creating a diverse student population. But even with that effort, Black students make up only 8 percent of the student population while Black people represent 22 percent of North Carolina’s population.
UNC-Chapel Hill will still be able to use other factors to create a mix of students that looks more like the state it serves. It can consider, for instance, an applicant’s family income level or geographic location. Some universities have taken to favoring students in the top 10 percent of their high schools, which helps students in predominantly minority high schools.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that while institutions can’t base admission decisions on race, applicants are still free to discuss how race shaped their lives in their applicant essays and interviews.
Nine states, including California, Florida and Michigan, already bar race-conscious admissions at their public universities. The result has been a drop-off in Black and Hispanic students and greater expense as the universities try alternative ways of attracting minority students.
Ironically, the cases against race-conscious admissions programs cite the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The constitutional change was adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War to require equal treatment under the law of formerly enslaved people. Now conservatives are arguing that giving Black minorities a preference in admissions amounts to illegal reverse discrimination.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court’s first Black female justice, wrote in her dissent in the UNC case: “To impose this result in that clause’s name when it requires no such thing, and to thereby obstruct our collective progress toward the full realization of the clause’s promise, is truly a tragedy for us all.”
Race-conscious admissions are over at UNC-Chapel Hill and across the nation, but the efforts by universities to find ways to ensure that minorities have access to top universities must continue.
