The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that colleges and universities cannot take race into consideration when granting admission, striking down decades of precedent.
The case involved the admissions policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a public university, and Harvard University, a private Ivy League college. The court ruled 6–3, with Republican-appointed justices joining the majority, and Democrat-appointed justices joining the minority.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor wrote (pdf) a lengthy, 70-page dissent that was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, arguing that Thursday’s ruling was tantamount to “entrenching racial inequality in education.”
“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 wrote in her dissent. “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.”…