President Joe Biden, the Anti-Defamation League and a host of left-wing organizations all agreed. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, handed down on June 29, was a blow against the effort to reverse racial inequality. The Democratic Party and its ethnic/religious auxiliary groups are fully committed to the notion that America in the year 2023 is not merely a nation with a tragic history of racial discrimination and bigotry. It is, in their eyes, one that remains irredeemably racist. And that’s why they supported the affirmative action admissions policies practiced by Harvard, as well as those in a related case involving the University of North Carolina, that were struck down by a 6-3 majority.
Affirmative action was conceived and first implemented in the heyday of the civil-rights movement that, after much struggle, ended the era in which racial discrimination was permitted by the law in much of the country. The notion was that it was necessary to give those groups that had been the victims of America’s original sin of slavery and the subsequent century of “Jim Crow” laws that perpetuated its legacy a leg up in their efforts to achieve equality.
