The six right wing Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court has continued their rampage with the gutting of Affirmative Action. Last week they ruled that the practice of considering race in the college admissions process was unconstitutional, effectively ending the practice of affirmative action.
This is white supremacy in action, as the six conservative justices carry out the objectives of the White nationalists who placed them there. How so? Some readers may ask.
First, White Supremacists deny the existence of systemic racism, and second, they stand against efforts to minimize, if not eliminate, racist practices (since they argue that none exist).
This is what the Supreme just did in the rulings against affirmative action. They denied the effects of race-based disparities in American society, and proceeded to abolish affirmative action, a modest means of addressing these disparities.
By declaring that it was time to end the affirmative action permitted by the Gutter decision two decades earlier Justice Roberts and the other five right-wing justices are arguing that racial discrimination and its effects do not exist anymore.
Chief Justice Roberts has long opposed two major race-based remedies—affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. He led the mostly gutting of VRA and now the elimination of affirmative action.
In 1965, in a commencement speech at Howard University—which I attended—President Johnson laid out his ideas for what became Affirmative Action. He said, “If two men are running a race and one of them has a ball and chain around his ankle, and he is there at the starting line fussing with that ball and chain while his opponent is halfway around the track running like mad, you can’t cut those chains off and say, ‘now you’re free, you’re free and equal, run the race.’ That’s not fair,” said Johnson. “That’s not fair; the other man’s halfway around the track. So, somehow, we got to start them at the same place or get this fellow up where he can catch up with the other man (emphasis added), then say run the race as equals.”
This idea, of course, was disavowed by Roberts-written decision. In her dissent Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attacked the whitewashing of racism in that decision. She wrote: “History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. 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.”
In his concurring opinion Justice Clarence Thomas expressed one of the long-held problematic ideas against affirmative action. “This is not 1958 or 1968,” he said. “Today’s youth do not shoulder moral debts of their ancestors.” I beg to differ.
In the 1980’s an African American lawyer sued the city of Milton, Massachusetts, after being harassed by police officers as he sat in his car in an upscale mostly White neighborhood waiting for his daughter who was visiting a White friend. My family and I arrived in Milton just in time to have our city taxes contribute to the $400,000 judgment the African American Lawyer won from the city. By Justice Thomas’ figuring, my family should not have to contribute to payment of the money owed because we were not there when the incident occurred. But that is not the way these things work.
My discipline issued a strong statement against the Court’s decision: “The American Sociological Association disagrees vigorously with the majority opinion and the reasoning behind it given that the accumulation of disadvantages based on race throughout American history cannot be undone without proactive policies and practices aimed at rectifying past discrimination and exclusion.”
Further, proof of the White Supremacist Anti-Black action is the grotesque part of the Court ruling that exempts military academies from this ban on Affirmative Action. Apparently, it is okay to have an affirmative action “leg up” to die for the Country, but not to live and work in the Country.