GOP Supreme Court Goes Against Precedence and Guts Affirmative Action

The GOP Supreme Court has again reversed decades of precedent and eliminated affirmative action in college admissions.  John Roberts cynically tried to tie his decision to Brown v. Board of education and the 14th Amendment (which was actually intended to address the inequities resulting from slavery).  In reality, the decision will go down in infamy and will require years of additional jurisprudence to wipe away.

The ruling, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter". She warned it "rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress".

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson - the first black woman ever to sit on the court - went further: "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."  "Having so detached itself from this country's actual past and present experiences," she added, "the court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that [the University of North Carolina] and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America's real-world problems."

The irony of the Supreme Courts' astonishing  reversal of affirmation action places the spotlight squarely on the one justice who benefited the most from affirmation action and seems now to resent it.  It was affirmative action that got Clarence into Holy Cross, and it was affirmation action that got him into Yale law school, and it was affirmative action that got him nominated to the high court. The fact that he owes his career and livelihood to affirmative action seems to be such a deeply held grievance that he feels compelled to work against it all his life.  “As much as it had stung to be told I’d done well in [high school] despite my race,” Thomas once wrote, “it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it.”

Shame seems to be a central tenet in Thomas' psychology.  Growing up, Thomas was steadfastly opposed to speaking his family's Gullah-Geechee dialect in public-- especially around white people. He believed that speaking with his native dialect would get him branded as poor, uneducated and disadvantaged. So Thomas stopped speaking Gullah in public. And he largely stopped speaking publicly at all, he once told the New York Times, for fear that any trace of that former life in his home town of Pin Point, Georgia would somehow work its way into his speech.

MSNBC's Joy Reid said, “I was not surprised because Clarence Thomas has been on a mission to dismantle every institutional attempt to help and aid, not just Black people, but any people who have been disadvantaged in this society since he’s gotten on the court,” she said. “He, like Samuel Alito, appears to operate from a kind of rage, a sort of cold rage, against . . . the second half of the 20th century, which they find to be an affront to their own self-image and to their image of America…”

Reid went on to say, "There was a nun, a White nun whose largesse helped get him through school, and get him those good grades. He has been assisted, you know, by White patrons, really, his whole life – even now by very rich ones, as they fly him around the country . . . and to your very point, he seems to deeply resent all of the assistance he got. And he wants to make sure that nobody like him ever gets that kind of help again because it helps his self-image so that he can lie to himself and fool himself, and maybe hate himself a little less for having gotten help all along his path to the Supreme Court."

Reid went on to say that during his contentious confirmation hearings in 1991, Thomas enjoyed the support of most Black people despite accusations of sexual harassment.  “And it was only Black people’s support in those polls that got wavering Democrats to vote for him,” she said. “And he has repaid Black people with scorn ever since.”

But there's no need for rich folks to worry-- legacy admissions are OK with Clarence.  That kind of affirmative action (giving a step up to unqualified kids who had the good fortune to be born rich) is perfectly acceptable.   Thomas seems to believe that affirmative action is OK for the descendants of people who benefited from slavery.  But for the descendants of victims of slavery, who can only get in to elite colleges because of good grades or their brains, well that's too fucking bad.  No help for you.