The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled against affirmative action. The highest court in the United States ruled that both Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) will no longer be able to use race for their admissions processes. Among the opinions, one of the most resounding was that of Clarance Thomas, who even read it aloud in court.
In two separate cases that came to the same conclusion, the conservative majority composed of John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito and Thomas himself, stood united in ruling that affirmative action on college campuses ran counter to 14th Amendment protections.
The final numbers were 6-3 for North Carolina (with Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Keagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting) and 6-2 for Harvard, as Jackson recused herself from the case due to her recent time at the university.
In his opinion, Clarence Thomas praised American exceptionalism, took aim at victimhood and even directly criticized Brown Jackson’s dissent.
“I hold out the enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles”
In his opinion, which he read aloud inside the courtroom, Thomas began with a historical review, acknowledging that the racial history of the United States is painful but that this is no longer the reality of today’s society.
Justice Clarence Thomas blasts Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's arguments in his concurrence:
KBJ "locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through… pic.twitter.com/c3fUQPWETP
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 29, 2023
“The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution,” he began.
“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law,” he added.
Thomas vs. Brown Jackson
In turn, he took direct aim at the view expressed by his colleague Brown-Jackson in his dissent. As Thomas wrote, Jackson’s “race-infused worldview” is “failing at every turn.”
“Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. 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 worldview based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism,” he added.
“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…Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously,” he closed.
