ALT text reads This loss, while devastating, is unsurprising. The Roberts Court has arguably been the most hostile to racial justice and Black civil rights since the post-Reconstruction Plessy Court, which rejected the promise of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments for the horror of Jim Crow. This Court’s obsession with “colorblindness” – a concept nowhere reflected in the Constitution or the lived reality in this country – is a euphemistic mask for maintaining a default reliance on white supremacy. Such “neutrality” has helped perpetuate centuries of systemic segregation, brutality, mass criminalization, and the associated diminution of Black political power and wealth.

ALT text reads After all, the Roberts Court cares nothing about white-centered forms of preferential treatment, such as legacy admissions. While white students continue to dominate elite campuses despite their alleged unfair treatment under affirmative action, legacy admissions – because of the very history of racial exclusion in education – categorically exclude almost all Black, Latinx and Indigenous students.

ALT text reads But the ideology of white supremacy on display gets even worse – or at least more naked. The Court actually green-lights continued race conscious admissions in military academies, signaling that in the United States, it is okay – even necessary – to recruit and train Black, Indigenous and Latinx students to fight U.S. wars of aggression but not to recruit and train them to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, and leaders.