It’s no easy trick to find a way for a society to accept responsibility for the wrongs of the past that will satisfy everyone as being fair and effective.  In today’s America, we can’t even agree that “we” have such a responsibility, much less concur on how we can make a good faith effort to address the injustices suffered by the generations of Black Americans since the early 17th century.

Three generations ago America made an effort when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  But many felt more was needed, and as Jerome Karabel explains in today’s New York Times, “In a historic commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson laid out the intellectual and moral basis for affirmative action.”

Speaking less than a year after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and two months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he invoked a metaphor that remains resonant 50 years later: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Affirmative action – race-based preferences in education, hiring and more – have been an attempt to correct historic race-based mistreatment.  Karabel says “After a brief honeymoon of public support, affirmative action was met with a powerful backlash, and the policy has been under attack ever since. Decades of lawsuits and legislation have chipped away at the use of racial preferences. And now, in a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court has consigned them to the grave.”

From the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

The votes split along ideological grounds, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing for the conservative members in the majority, and the liberals dissenting. While the ruling involved race-conscious programs at Harvard and UNC, it will affect virtually every college and university in the United States.

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. “Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they 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.”

Roberts said the admissions programs at Harvard and UNC “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

But he added that “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

(snip)

In a lengthy dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latina justice, wrote that it is “a disturbing feature of today’s decision that the Court does not even attempt to make the extraordinary showing required” to reverse precedent [of previous court rulings supporting affirmative action].

Sotomayor, who has said her own life is an example of how affirmative action programs can work, spoke at length from the bench on Thursday, a tactic justices use to mark their profound disagreement with a decision.

“Equal educational opportunity is a prerequisite to achieving racial equality in our Nation,” she wrote, joined by [Justice Ketanji Brown] Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan.

“Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits,” Sotomayor’s dissent said. “In so holding, the Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.”

As Jackson put it, “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.”

If it can find that race can’t be a factor in college admissions, it should only a matter of time before the court expands that reasoning to include private business, and to say that considerations of race – in the form of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives – are also unconstitutional.

More from Karabel:

While race-conscious affirmative action is no longer permissible, it is worth noting that the Supreme Court ruling leaves intact many other forms of affirmative action — preferences for the children of alumni, preferences for the children of donors and preferences for student athletes, including for such boutique sports as sailing, fencing and squash. The consequences of this change are not entirely predictable, but based on what happened at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley, after they were barred from pursuing race-conscious admission policies, a sharp decline in Black and perhaps Hispanic enrollments at highly selective colleges and professional schools seems almost certain. To offset the loss, many colleges are likely to switch to a policy of affirmative action based on economic class. Such a policy would attenuate, although by no means eliminate, the racial impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Affirmative action based on economic class is likely to enjoy broader public support than race-conscious affirmative action; according to a recent Washington Post poll, 62 percent of Americans believe that students from low-income families have an unfair disadvantage in getting into a good college. [David Brooks discusses this idea in the New York Times today.]  But affirmative action on its own, whether based on race or economic class, is far too limited a tool to realize the dream of the great civil rights movement of the 1960s for full racial equality. As we confront a world without race-conscious affirmative action, we would do well to remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that to produce real equality, “the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.”

I think most Americans agree that race should not matter, in college admissions or anything else.  (Not all agree, I’m afraid…and you know who you are.)  We wish it were true.  But as we all learned in our youth, wishing a thing doesn’t make it so.  Honest people will acknowledge that while we as a society have made great progress, race does still matter today.  Rulings such as this one seem aimed at making sure that some white Americans are shielded from any responsibility for righting the wrongs of the past.  Or of even acknowledging that there were past wrongs that need addressing.  That’s not a viable strategy for righting the wrongs.

(Jelani Cobb on “The End of Affirmative Action” in The New Yorker: “…almost from the outset, critics of the policy could be seen impatiently tapping their watches, questioning how long (white) society was meant to endure the patent unfairness of these racial considerations.”)