MSNBC's Symone Sanders and The Atlantic's Ibram X. Kendi break down the recent ruling by the Supreme Court ending affirmative action in college admissions. They also did a great job taking apart Mike Pence's ridiculous assertion that there is no longer any racial inequity in the education system in America and that the United States is now "a color blind society."
SANDERS: A color-blind society. That concept was the central struggle of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down race conscious admission policies last week. Now, on the campaign trail and elsewhere, the takeaway seems to be we have achieved some kind of color blind nirvana, that has race conscious solutions to systematic inequities actually just disenfranchise white people.
So we should be race neutral, or color-blind, like presidential candidate Mike Pence suggests. To bolster this argument in the courts majority opinion last week and Chief Justice John Roberts cited Jim Crow era justice John Marshall Harlan, a man often called the great dissenter.
Roberts pointed to a specific section of Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 as a separate but equal case. He wrote “The constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” And in part, for that reason, the court found that affirmative action was a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
But that Roberts majority opinion happened to skip this part of Harlan's 1896 dissent, right before the color-blind constitution sentence. Harlan, writes “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige and achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.”
A color blind constitution on one hand, and a quote, dominant race on the other. Two diametrically opposed concepts on the same page.
As Sanders discussed, “this contradiction was actually laid bare in a new piece” at The Atlantic, before quoting from several portions of the article:
In the actual world, the “color-blind” often see their color as superior, as Harlan did. In the actual world, an equal-protection clause in a constitution can be transfigured by legal fantasy yet again to protect racial inequity.
[…]
History sometimes repeats without rhyming. “Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal.”
[…]
Then, the fantasy was that separate facilities for education afforded to the races were equal and that actions to desegregate them were unnecessary, if not harmful. Today, the fantasy is that regular college-admissions metrics are race-neutral and that affirmative action is unnecessary, if not harmful.
[…]
Now that “racial neutrality” is the doctrine of the land, as “separate but equal” was a century ago, we need a new legal movement to expose its fantastical nature.
Kendi joined Sanders to further discuss the article and this atrocity of a ruling from the Supreme Court which you can watch below.
