This post originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, with the majority ruling in two cases — one at the University of North Carolina, the other at Harvard University — that the practice violates the Equal Protection clause. The UNC case split 6-3; the Harvard case was split 6-2, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself.
The ruling ends race-related affirmative action at the nation’s oldest public and private higher education institutions, respectively. Justice Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor were deeply critical of the majority ruling in their dissenting opinions, with Jackson calling it “truly a tragedy for us all.” The other dissenter in these cases was Justice Elena Kagan.
“Chief Justice Roberts's opinion seemingly forecloses any meaningful racial considerations in admissions,” Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the courts, tweeted. Stern noted that Roberts’s opinion “explicitly exempts” military academies from the race-based admissions ban. Teen Vogue has previously covered how military recruitment specifically targets youth from marginalized backgrounds who have less access to traditional pathways to higher education.
“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” wrote Justice Sotomayor in her dissent. “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.”
Within an hour of the announcement, groups including the NAACP began preparing protests. “The decision undermines the rights of underrepresented groups to pursue higher education and will lead to devastating ripple effects across schools and workplaces nationwide,” Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, which pushes for gender equality and equity in schools and universities, said in a statement. “Despite the majority Court’s reasoning, white privilege continues to dictate educational outcomes in this country.”
Sociologist and lawyer Wendy Leo Moore wrote for Teen Vogue in 2022 that the undermining of race-based affirmative action was an orchestrated campaign in response to the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. A “national public media campaign designed to create white opposition to affirmative action” falsely implied that the practice effectively discriminates against white people, Moore wrote. In fact, Moore added that white women have long been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action through gender-based policies. And people pointed out that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a legacy student at Yale, his alma mater.
“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the rip cord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” wrote Justice Jackson in her dissent. “Having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
“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,” Justice Jackson’s dissent continued. “And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.”
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