Forty-five years and a day after one Supreme Court justice opened the door to race-based college admissions (the 1978 Bakke case), six justices closed it. The court has finally recognized that the Constitution prohibits such racial discrimination. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, “ending racial discrimination means ending all of it.” It’s unbelievable that it took until 2023 to do so, but sometimes the wheels of justice are slow.
Sometimes it also takes a while for the high court to coalesce around a position that long ago became startlingly obvious to anyone not steeped in judicial artifice or postmodern identity politics — which includes a majority of every American demographic group. That’s one important way in which the atmospherics of Thursday’s blockbuster ruling of the term is different from the Dobbs abortion case last year: Americans are genuinely split on abortion, whereas they overwhelmingly oppose racial preferences in admissions.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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