Later this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases—Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina—which ask whether the use of race as a factor in determining college and university admissions violates the Constitution. One justice who will undoubtedly vote against affirmative action in those cases is Clarence Thomas, who has spent years calling for the practice to be overruled.
"When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry, or academia, it is an open question today whether their skin color played a part in their advancement," Thomas wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), in which the Court upheld the University of Michigan's use of race in law school admissions. "The question itself is the stigma—because either racial discrimination did play a role, in which case the person may be deemed 'otherwise unqualified,' or it did not, in which case asking the question itself unfairly marks those blacks who would succeed without discrimination."
