Affirmative action ruling consistent with struggle against US racist past

For decades, colleges and universities were allowed to discriminate on the basis of race alone against applicants in the admissions processes. On January 29, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against this practice of affirmative action in students for fair admissions versus Harvard, and in doing so overturned one of our country’s last vestiges of legal racial discrimination.

Contrary to what some critics have said, the court’s decision to reject affirmative action does not herald the return to the racist era of our country’s past. Rather, it is the continuation of our country’s long and successful struggle against racial discrimination and in favor of equal rights for all. In the courts majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted the words of another great Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan in 1896. Justice Harlan was the lone dissenter against the court’s mistaken decision in Plessy versus Ferguson, which protected racial segregation. In his dissent, Justice Harlan wrote in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country, no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

I grew up with Justice Harlands dissent ringing in my ears. It was the clarion call of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the Kennedy administration, under Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall. It was the spirit of the legal struggle for civil rights. The Civil Rights divisions mission was to enforce federal civil rights law and guarantee that African Americans in the South enjoyed equal rights as American citizens and the divisions lawyers, including my father, John Doerr, fought some of the most decisive legal battles to secure civil rights, from voting cases to the integration of universities. This spirit of the Civil Rights Division and the case for equal rights drew on many sources in addition to justice Harlands dissent. Of course, there are the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. More recent was the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown versus Board of Education that struck down racial segregation in public schools. This decision had been based on the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection before the law.

When concurring with Justice Roberts his decision in the affirmative action case, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas highlighted the 14th Amendment, as well as the 13th amendment that abolished slavery. He wrote, the history of these measures enactment, renders their motivating principle as clear as they’re taxed. All citizens of the United States, regardless of skin color, are equal before the law.

Equality before the law was also the motivating principle of the civil rights movement, and its campaign of nonviolent resistance and peaceful protest against racial discrimination in the southern United States. It was the spirit of the leaders who organized the 1963 march on Washington, and countless other demonstrations. And it was the message that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 1963. Dr. King told us then, that his goal was that his children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Our country has made great strides toward fulfilling Dr. King’s dream. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The federal government put an end to the days of legal segregation, and took decisive action to ensure African Americans right to vote, the spirit of justice Harlands dissent, and our founding documents became the law of the land in most areas of American life, but in one area, we got away from that spirit. In the years since the civil rights movement. We witnessed the rise of college admissions policies that put skin color over character and ability. These policies clearly put some citizens before others. Even so the Supreme Court protected them as recently as 2003. Asian Americans, including the plaintiffs in the Harvard case, were treated most unjustly by these policies. The court found they were discriminated against and overturned affirmative action

on the same grounds as the great cases of the civil rights movement.

Now we can add Justice Roberts decision, and justice Thomas’s concurrence to the canon of great defenses of equal protection, regardless of race. These documents are consistent with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the 14th Amendment, just as Harlands dissent, Brown versus Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and Dr. King’s dream. With the Court’s recent decision, we’ve gotten back to our founding principles