While great progress has been made in advancing equality of opportunity (not outcomes), the lasting effects of centuries of race-based oppression — from enslavement to Jim Crow to segregation to implicit bias — still linger, and disfavored minorities (African Americans whose ancestors did not come by choice and did not voluntarily accept the “social contract”; Indigenous Americans who were here before anyone else; Latino Americans who are the descendants of indigenous peoples from conquered civilizations in lands further south) face obstacles that were created by racial considerations, and can only be eradicated by recognizing those realities and dismantling them based on the race-based obstacles as they exist and, yes, that means factoring in race (the causative agent) in remediating the injustice.
If only blue-eyed people have been forced for years into deep pits based only on the color of their eyes, and then when it comes time to get people out of the deep pits you put them in you give the ladders to the blue-eyed people in the pits, it is not oppression against the people who are already topside; the ones who put them there in the first place. The ones who were never in the pits are not the ones who need the ladders. Sheesh.
Clarence Thomas, who rose to the heights of power and largesse from a billionaire sugar daddy (who worships Nazis, collects Nazi paraphernalia and has Nazi statues in his garden) with the benefit of Affirmative Action, as he acknowledge in his separate concurring opinion, now seeks to pull the ladder he climbed up behind him.
Chief Justice Roberts carved out a military exception. THEY KNOW that, when it comes to national defense, how worthy Affirmative Action can be. As Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her UNC dissent (she recused on the Harvard case having been on Harvard’s board), they will allow Affirmative Action in sending soldiers to the battlefield, but not executives to the boardroom.
While great progress has been made in advancing equality of opportunity (not outcomes), the lasting effects of centuries of race-based oppression — from enslavement to Jim Crow to segregation to implicit bias — still linger, and disfavored minorities (African Americans whose ancestors did not come by choice and did not voluntarily accept the “social contract”; Indigenous Americans who were here before anyone else; Latino Americans who are the descendants of indigenous peoples from conquered civilizations in lands further south) face obstacles that were created by racial considerations, and can only be eradicated by recognizing those realities and dismantling them based on the race-based obstacles as they exist and, yes, that means factoring in race (the causative agent) in remediating the injustice.
If only blue-eyed people have been forced for years into deep pits based only on the color of their eyes, and then when it comes time to get people out of the deep pits you put them in you give the ladders to the blue-eyed people in the pits, it is not oppression against the people who are already topside; the ones who put them there in the first place. The ones who were never in the pits are not the ones who need the ladders. Sheesh.
Clarence Thomas, who rose to the heights of power and largesse from a billionaire sugar daddy (who worships Nazis, collects Nazi paraphernalia and has Nazi statues in his garden) with the benefit of Affirmative Action, as he acknowledge in his separate concurring opinion, now seeks to pull the ladder he climbed up behind him.
Chief Justice Roberts carved out a military exception. THEY KNOW that, when it comes to national defense, how worthy Affirmative Action can be. As Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her UNC dissent (she recused on the Harvard case having been on Harvard’s board), they will allow Affirmative Action in sending soldiers to the battlefield, but not executives to the boardroom.