In a long-awaited decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court declared that affirmative action policies are unconstitutional because they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As you can expect, The court was split on ideological lines. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s affirmative action pick for the Supreme Court, blasted the majority opinion in her dissenting opinion.
“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 claimed. “And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.”
“No one benefits from ignorance,” she continued. “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. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism.”
Jackson obviously has no problem advancing through life based on the color of her skin rather than on merit. Joe Biden promised to appoint a black female justice to the Supreme Court and followed through. He may have picked someone who doesn’t know what a female is, but he picked her nonetheless. As one could have easily assumed, she’s no different that the usual race hustlers of the radical left, and she got called out on it by none other than Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion.
“Accordingly, JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments,” Thomas wrote. “What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.”
Oh, but he wasn’t done yet.
“JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to ‘experts’ and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race,” Thomas continued. “Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will ‘tell us [what] is required to level the playing field’ among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. […] Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision.”
Thomas went on to accuse Jackson of using race-based stereotypes in her dissent and never seemed to pull a punch to shred her dissent to pieces.
Though JUSTICE JACKSON seems to think that her race- based theory can somehow benefit everyone, it is an immutable fact that “every time the government uses racial criteria to ‘bring the races together,’ someone gets excluded, and the person excluded suffers an injury solely because of his or her race.” […] Indeed, JUSTICE JACKSON seems to have no response—no explanation at all—for the people who will shoulder that burden. How, for example, would JUSTICE JACKSON explain the need for race-based preferences to the Chinese student who has worked hard his whole life, only to be denied college admission in part because of his skin color? If such a burden would seem difficult to impose on a bright-eyed young person, that’s because it should be. History has taught us to abhor theories that call for elites to pick racial winners and losers in the name of sociological experimentation.
“This vision of meeting social racism with government-imposed racism is thus self-defeating, resulting in a never-ending cycle of victimization,” his response to Jackson concluded. “There is no reason to continue down that path. In the wake of the Civil War, the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment charted a way out: a colorblind Constitution that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.”
Drop that mic, Justice Thomas; you nailed it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member