Last week as I sat in a room full of deeply talented, wonderfully-kind and resilient BIPOC journalists discussing the importance of diversity in newsrooms as part of our Maynard 200 training, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that race-conscious admissions policies violate the equal-protection clause under the U.S. Constitution — effectively putting an end to affirmative action.
As someone who has benefited from affirmative action policies, this ruling felt like a punch to the gut. As I wrote on Twitter, this ruling only serves to increase the opportunity gap, a sentiment Justice Sonia Sotomayor included in her dissent.
“By ending race-conscious college admissions, this Court closes the door of opportunity that the Court’s precedents helped open to young students of every race,” she wrote. “[The ruling] creates a leadership pipeline that is less diverse than our increasingly diverse society, reserving ‘positions of influence, affluence, and prestige in America’ for a predominantly white pool of college graduates.”
It’s still too soon to know exactly how this ruling will impact admissions at universities that have used race as a factor, reports URL Media partner Sahan Journal. But the consequences will undoubtedly reach students, families and communities nationwide.
Following the ruling, nonprofit news outlet Capital B spoke with an admissions dean about this decision’s implications for college applicants in a post-affirmative action world.
“Given this decision, it’s going to be very, very important for Black applicants to be able to articulate their lived experiences in their essays for schools that do holistic reviews and have essays as a part of the admission process,” said Timothy L. Fields, a senior associate dean at Emory University in Atlanta.
But this wasn’t the only devastating decision the court made last week.
The court’s conservative majority also upheld the right of business owners whose services involve speech — such as artists, speechwriters, and movie directors — to refuse working with the LGBTQ+ community.
“A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner’s religious belief that same-sex marriages are ‘false,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group. I dissent.”
The six conservative justices also struck down the Biden Administration’s student-loan forgiveness plan, which would have canceled approximately $430 billion in student loan debt for millions of people.
“The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “[T]he HEROES Act provides no authorization for the Secretary’s plan when examined using the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation—let alone ‘clear congressional authorization’ for such a program.”
Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent said the court had exceeded its “proper, limited role.”
“In adjudicating Missouri’s claim, the majority reaches out to decide a matter it has no business deciding,” she continued. “It blows through a constitutional guardrail intended to keep courts acting like courts.”
Biden, in a speech following the ruling, called the decision “wrong” and a “mistake,” and announced a new approach to provide relief to millions of borrowers. Details of those plans are still evolving, but additional information can be found here.
Any one of these decisions on its own is a detriment to our nation, but all three put us on a dangerous course that pushes people already forced to live on the margins to the brink.
As Sotomayor wrote in her dissent to the affirmative action ruling, “Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.”
