Today is a sad day in American history.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against race-conscious programs at universities, handing a win to a group that argued that the institutions shouldn’t consider race in evaluating applications for admission. The high court, which has a conservative majority, had been expected to return a decision that wasn’t favorable for affirmative action.
The ruling is a massive blow to a nearly three decades-old efforts to diversify American universities.
The majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in, said that both Harvard’s and UNC’s affirmative action programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”
“We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” Roberts wrote.
The majority said that the universities’ policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal and African-American, in a dissent called the ruling “truly a tragedy for us all.”
Her fellow liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a sharp dissent, said, “Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
Sotomayor, one of three liberals on the court, said that the majority “holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits.”
