Darren Lyn
June 29, 2023•Update: June 30, 2023
HOUSTON, United States
The US Supreme Court on Thursday outlawed the decades-old practice known as affirmative action in college admissions that considered race as a factor in selecting students.
Universities 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," said Chief Justice John Roberts in the conservative majority ruling.
The high court opinion went on to say that the affirmative action programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina “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 continued, adding that the universities' policies violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented the vote.
“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress," said Sotomayor, arguing that the Supreme Court now “cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal and African-American, also dissented the ruling calling it “truly a tragedy for us all.”
However, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, the nation's second Black justice, heralded the ruling saying that the decision “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”
The Supreme Court's ruling reverses the admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation's oldest private and public colleges, respectively, and the decision now sets precedent for colleges across the United States to find new ways to achieve diversity in their student bodies.
