The Supreme Court on affirmative action, in their own words

The Supreme Court nixed affirmative action programs for admission decisions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in a major ruling Thursday.

Chief Justice John Roberts penned the majority opinion joined by his five fellow conservative peers: Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The three liberal justices on the bench Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented in the UNC case.

Jackson, who was previously a member of the Harvard University’s Board of Overseers, recused herself in the Harvard University companion case.

Below are the key passages from each opinion in the hotly anticipated ruling.

Chief Justice John Roberts

In his majority opinion, Roberts ticked through a litany of Supreme Court precedents and test cases to poke holes in arguments in favor of preserving Harvard and UNC’s affirmative action practices.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual not on the basis of race,” he wrote.

“Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Roberts cited the Equal Protection Clause, a provision in the Fourteenth Amendment that posits in part that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Roberts wrote. “And the Equal Protection Clause, we have accordingly held, applies ‘without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality’—it is ‘universal in [its] application.’”

Roberts underscored that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life.”

The chief justice also knocked both institutions for declining to say when their use of affirmative action might end.

“Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points,” he wrote. “We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

Justice Clarence Thomas

Thomas, one of two black justices on the high court, wrote an opinion concurring with Roberts and recounting his own experiences.

“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law,” he wrote.

The court’s most senior justice noted that he has long contended that affirmative action practices in higher education institutions run afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Thomas described his concurrence as a “an originalist defense of the colorblind Constitution” and insisted that “all forms of discrimination based on race including so-called affirmative action are prohibited under the Constitution.”

He also warned the high court’s past failure to interpret the Constitution properly had led to tragedy.

“The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And the tragic failure of this Court was its interpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments,” he wrote. “We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that our present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.”

At one point, Thomas also tore into fellow Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent.

“Justice Jackson would replace the second Founders’ vision with an organizing principle based on race. In fact, on her view, almost all of life’s outcomes may be unhesitatingly ascribed to race,” he contended.

“Even if some whites have a lower household net worth than some blacks, what matters to Justice Jackson is that the average white household has more wealth than the average black household,” he added. “This lore is not and has never been true. Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color.”

“Then as now, not all disparities are based on race; not all people are racist; and not all differences between individuals are ascribable to race.”

His concurrence prompted a fiery rebuttal from Jackson, who argued that he responded to “a dissent I did not write” and “demonstrates an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Sotomayor, the first Latina and first woman of color to serve on the court, heartily excoriated the majority opinion, contending the decision was not “grounded in law or fact.”

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress,” she wrote. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

Sotomayor rehashed the lengthy history of court rulings pertaining to race in the country and argued that the majority decision deviated from precedent.

“For more than four decades, it has been this Court’s settled law that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes a limited use of race in college admissions in service of the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” she wrote.

Supreme Court rules against Affirmative Action in higher education

What is affirmative action?

Affirmative action is the practice of favoring individuals belonging to groups subject to discrimination — including minorities — for employment and educational opportunities.

How is it used in college admissions?

In the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, SCOTUS ruled colleges could consider race as a factor in the admissions process to assemble a more diverse student body.

What is happening now…

The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Thursday, ruling that both institutions were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection under the law” for all US citizens.

While colleges can consider an applicant’s “discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise … universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” Chief Justice John Roberts concluded in his opinion.

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She further argued that the majority opinion is also “grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation.”

“Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today,” she wrote. “Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Jackson also did not mince words with her thoughts on the majority ruling.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces
‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote.

“No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race-linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better.”

Jackson emphasized that “gulf-sized race-based gaps exist” that “were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day.”

Like Sotomayor, Jackson argued that nothing in the “Constitution or Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act] prohibits institutions from taking race into account to ensure the racial diversity of admits in higher education.”

“Our country has never been colorblind,” she added.

“Given our history, the origin of persistent race-linked gaps should be no mystery,” she later added. “The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark.”

Jackson also rattled through multiple statistics about modern racial disparities in American society.

“The irony is that requiring colleges to ignore the initial race-linked opportunity gap between applicants … will inevitably widen that gap, not narrow it,” she wrote. “It will delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of race.”