The Supreme Court effectively ends affirmative action

The Supreme Court’s decision to effectively ban the consideration of race in college admissions reversed more than 40 years of precedent. It also left other kinds of admission preferences in place — ones that often benefit white students.

For decades, the Court held that schools could consider race as one of many factors in the holistic review of an applicant, a consideration that could help foster diversity on campus.

Corporations have already scaled back the diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts they launched in 2020 amid an ultimately stunted racial reckoning. Now the question is whether the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions will lead them to further rein in these programs to avoid potential legal challenges.

One thingis clear: The laws surrounding affirmative action in employment haven’t changed.

On June 29, the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in a 6-3 decision that drastically limits public and private universities from using race-conscious admissions policies. The case’s plaintiff, a group called the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), argued that such provisions discriminate against Asian American students.

Effectively, SFFA suggested, the institutions targeted in these suits — Harvard and the University of North Carolina — used race-conscious policies that hurt Asian Americans’ chances of being accepted, while unfairly boosting opportunities for Black and Latino students. The Court seemed swayed by this notion, finding that affirmative action leads to discrimination.

The Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action policies at two colleges, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, are illegal, a decision that is likely to drastically limit admissions officers’ consideration of race as a factor in college applications, and has the potential to transform the makeup of the American student body.

The Court has supported the use of race in admissions for nearly 50 years, but what’s different now is its new conservative supermajority. Out of nine justices, six are conservative, and with Chief Justice John Roberts’s acknowledgment of his preference for race-neutral admissions policies,sweeping restrictions on affirmative action were all but certain. In the Court’s decision, those six justices all voted to effectively end race-conscious admissions, arguing that such policies violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

When Clarence Thomas started his first semester of law school during the summer of 1971, a familiar fear set over him: He knew he could succeed academically, but he was intimidated by his new surroundings on Yale’s tree-lined urban campus — and also terrified to fail.

During his first week of classes, he wondered how his peers were already comfortably decoding legal doctrine and whether he’d ever be able to catch up, he would later recount in his memoir My Grandfather’s Son. Thomas spent part of his childhood in a rural Georgia community, where he lived in a shack, fetched water from the woods in lard buckets, and slept in a chair for a year when he was 6 years old. He questioned his abilities not because he was Black, but because he had grown up poor.

The Supreme Court’s much-anticipated affirmative action decision Thursday does not explicitly overrule the Court’s previous decisions permitting race-conscious university admissions, but it will almost certainly have the same effect as a total ban.

And that will “impair the military’s ability to maintain diverse leadership, and thereby seriously undermine its institutional legitimacy and operational effectiveness.”

Affirmative action as we know it is gone. In a 6-3 ruling today in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a companion lawsuit against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court discarded decades of legal precedent by ruling that colleges may no longer consider race when admitting students.

The Court was unmoved by the near-unanimous belief among people who run colleges that student diversity is essential for education, or by the many barriers that continue to stand between students of color and college degrees. Because nearly all private colleges, including Harvard, receive federal funding, they are now subject to the court’s brand-new interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination.

The Supreme Court spent an inordinate amount of time on Monday hearing arguments in two cases about affirmative action in university admissions. Virtually nothing said in those arguments is likely to change the final outcome.

The six justices appointed by Republican presidents appeared determined from the beginning to implement the Republican Party’s preferred approach to race and the Constitution, while the three justices appointed by Democrats appeared equally determined to adopt the Democratic Party’s stance. That means that the Court is highly likely to implement the GOP’s longtime position that affirmative action should be illegal.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was hearing only the third case of her career as a Supreme Court justice when she went after one of her conservative colleagues’ most sacred cows: the idea that the Constitution requires all US laws to be colorblind.

The Court’s right flank — now in the majority — has long argued that US laws cannot draw distinctions on the basis of race. As Chief Justice John Roberts argued in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District (2007), a case about whether public school districts may take voluntary steps to racially integrate its schools, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”