President Joe Biden made it very clear after the controversial and contentious 2020 election that he would use affirmative action when nominating Supreme Court of the United States Justices.
And now SCOTUS has actually ruled on affirmative action being used for college admission.
But the high court’s two black Justices are going to war over the verdict.
SCOTUS rules on affirmative action use in universities
For decades, Asian and white students have had to score better on college admission tests like the SAT and ACT than their black and Hispanic counterparts.
A group of Asians sued over the affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that hold some students to a higher standard than others based solely on race.
The decision was split down ideological lines, 6-3.
Obama and Biden-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elana Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled with the universities and in favor of racist affirmative action policies.
Meanwhile, Republican-appointed Justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the students looking for nothing more than a fair shake.
Now universities will no longer be allowed to use race as a metric for selecting who makes the grade for admissions – although creative admission counselors will surely find loopholes to make sure so-called “lived experience” outweighs merit at the end of the day.
However, the decision put the High Court’s two black Justices at odds.
KBJ decided to take shots at Justice Thomas in her dissent – and Thomas didn’t mince words firing back.
KBJ plays the race card
Brown-Jackson spends the 29-pages of her dissent explaining the “universal benefits of considering race” in higher education.
Of course, she links this back to slavery and supposed “intergenerational transmission of inequality.”
And she raked her fellow black Associate Justice over the coals with ad hominem attacks for disagreeing with her.
“(Justice Thomas) has an obsession with race consciousness that far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences,” KBJ wrote in her dissent. “Justice Thomas ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here. The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink-elephant paradox) refuse to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room— the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great Nation’s full potential.”
Putting Justice Brown Jackson’s poor grammar aside, she’s basically calling Thomas an Uncle Tom.
And that personal attack is now a matter of Constitutional law that will remain in the record books for all of U.S. history.
Thomas drops a truth bomb on KBJ
But Thomas – who grew up under Jim Crow in the Deep South – wanted his own chance at a volley.
So, he wrote a 57-page concurrence of his own, pointing out the errors of KBJ’s ways.
“Justice Jackson uses her broad observations about statistical relationships between race and select measures of health, wealth, and well-being to label all blacks as victims,” Thomas wrote in his concurrence. “Her desire to do so is unfathomable to me. I cannot deny the great accomplishments of black Americans, including those who succeeded despite long odds. Nor do Justice Jackson’s statistics regarding a correlation between levels of health, wealth, and well-being between selected racial groups prove anything. Of course, none of those statistics are capable of drawing a direct causal link between race—rather than socioeconomic status or any other factor—and individual outcomes. So Justice Jackson supplies the link herself: the legacy of slavery and the nature of inherited wealth. This, she claims, 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 barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”
And THAT is why many regard Thomas as, perhaps, the greatest Supreme Court Justice of all time.
