Supreme Court’s disregard for history worsens America’s racial future
It is a disingenuous ploy by the Supreme Court to equate the children of America’s most educated classes with the descendants of our nation’s history of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
Douglas Lissing/Getty Images
Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action policies by universities, prohibiting them from considering race when deciding whether to admit qualified applicants. To do so, the Court majority relied on two tricks that have been overlooked in much of the discussion of the related cases. Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina And he filed a lawsuit against Harvard University. These two tactics are reverberating and are pushing America towards becoming an even more racist country.
In the first decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority manipulated the term “race” to mean something entirely different from what the word meant in its landmark 1954 decision against racial discrimination. Brown v. Board of EducationSecond, the bill similarly manipulated and exploited claims of discrimination made by certain Asian Americans seeking admission to competitive colleges and universities, launching a full-scale attack on affirmative action.
The reason these tricks matter now, as the Supreme Court’s latest term comes to an end, is that they distort the history of race relations in the United States and write falsehoods into the law in ways that make it even easier for others to attack racial justice in voting rights, employment, housing and criminal justice.
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As I wrote in detail in my May diary: context, First, we need to take into account historical changes in meaning. brown decision. In 2007, in a case about racial balance in Seattle schools, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted the NAACP’s oral arguments out of context. brown: “Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a state has no power to use race as a factor in granting educational opportunity to its citizens.” The idea of not taking race into account JeezEven to overcome racial inequality is a controversial interpretation, to say the least. brown,They argued that racial discrimination in public schools was unconstitutional.
when brown Everyone knew that the word race was synonymous with black people when segregation was decided in 1954. The NAACP had been campaigning for decades to end America’s racial caste system, based on the principle of “separate but equal,” which continued to treat former slaves and their descendants as second-class citizens. brown, Topeka, Kansas, and the three other communities where the incident originated were home to few racial or ethnic groups other than white and black. brown The lawsuit was filed because in 1950, about 0.3 percent of Americans belonged to ethnic groups that are now classified as Asian on the census, 10 percent were black, and people of Hispanic or Latino origin were not yet included as distinct census categories.
Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP argued that the state used segregation to subordinate black people. Marshall never argued that racial categories should be ignored as a factor affecting human lives, only that race should not be used as part of a racial hierarchy.
Nevertheless, Roberts brown Roberts used it as a rhetorical ploy: “To end racism means to end all racism,” he wrote, ignoring the history of slavery, the Civil War and Jim Crow laws. In doing so, he used the iconic decision that ended state-mandated segregation in public schools in 1954 to undermine efforts by university officials in 2023 to acknowledge and overcome racial disadvantage.
Second, consider how arguments about discrimination against Asian Americans and other Asians have been used to launch a blanket attack on affirmative action. To be sure, Asian Americans have suffered a long history of discrimination in the United States, beginning with the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Supreme Court cases that upheld those laws. Japanese Americans were interned in internment camps during World War II. Research shows that Asian Americans have faced discrimination in the workplace and in their communities ever since. Since the COVID pandemic, Asian Americans have experienced increased levels of violence and ridicule.
At the same time, as Natasha Waricou points out, Is Affirmative Action Fair?, Many Asian Americans living in the United States today are the descendants of immigrants who were lured into high-status professional and technical jobs with low wages and little housing security, and many were able to choose to live in places that offered the best educational opportunities for their children.
This group is responsible for the sharp increase in Asian Americans being admitted to selective schools. At Harvard, 29.9 percent of this year’s admitted students are Asian American, 15.3 percent are African American/black, 11.3 percent are Hispanic/Latino/Latino, 2.7 percent are Native American/Native Hawaiian, and 40.8 percent are white. At the University of North Carolina, 25 percent of this year’s admitted students are Asian, 11 percent are black, 11 percent are Hispanic or Latino, 2 percent are Native American or Alaska Native, and 63 percent are white. Nationwide, 5.7 percent of high school graduates are Asian American, 14.6 percent are African American, 20.2 percent are Hispanic or Latino, and 56.5 percent are white. In other words, while discrimination against Asian American applicants may be true, they are being admitted to elite schools at high rates.
And here’s why this matters: It’s a ploy to equate Asian American children in this highly educated corner of the United States with the descendants of a history of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Conservative justices and their allies use the word “race” to erase the historical reality of the severe disadvantages that African Americans have suffered for generations. As Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in their dissent, African Americans have suffered cumulative disadvantage in many areas. Their failure to accumulate family wealth, their accumulated education loans, their rates of incarceration, their risk of being stopped by police — these are some of the latest manifestations of the racial hierarchy that Marshall and the NAACP were fighting. brown.
In these and other cases, the Supreme Court is part of a larger national movement to rewrite the history and meaning of race in American society.Shelby County v. Holder In 2013, Roberts, by a 5-4 majority, repealed parts of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts essentially wrote that because racial segregation was gone, states and counties with a history of racial segregation no longer had to get pre-approval from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division for any potential changes to their voting rules. So what happened next? Those jurisdictions passed a slew of new laws that disproportionately impacted racial minority groups and made it more difficult to vote.
As with state legislatures passing laws banning the teaching of what they call misleading critical race theory and “divisive” topics on racial history, as well as conservative attacks on “diversity” and programs that support it, the Supreme Court and its allies are attempting to cover up America’s racial history in order to reinforce a current racial hierarchy in which whites have political and economic dominance. They are creating the fiction of a color-indifferent society while some states are actively trying to exclude black Americans from the political sphere. We cannot allow that.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
