The Extreme Court is at it again
We may all sleep easier. Chief Justice John Roberts and his cabal of judicial cranks have adjudicated racism into the nether regions. Any day they will follow up this act by also abolishing evil by decree.
This leitmotif of sarcasm in a minor key is brought to you by the absurd 6 to 3 decision handed down by the conservative two thirds of Roberts’ SCOTUS. Their decision says that American colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis for granting admissions. It is a huge blow to affirmative action, a playing field-levelling group of government policies.
Affirmative action seeks to include particular groups based on gender, race, sexuality, creed or nationality in areas in which such groups are ordinarily underrepresented. Affirmative action makes an unfair world a tiny bit more fair, and white conservatives will have none of it. It’s a blow to the Good Old Boys Network.
White supremacists want the world and they want it all to themselves. Hating affirmative action is nothing less than another way white supremacists can hate people of colour and women and gay people and all the rest without having to admit what they are out loud: loathsome bigots and misogynists.
By implying that affirmative action is “racist” the Republican part of SCOTUS has once again played yet another card from the MAGA deck. MAGA wants to do away with anything that makes their white agenda look remotely impure and guilty. That’s why they hate the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s why they invent nonsense like the idea that esoteric epistemologies such as “critical race theory” are being taught in grade schools. It’s their way of advancing the agenda of racism and stamping out any and all resistance.
But, but, but, you say, didn’t Clarence Thomas vote for this outrageous repeal, and is he not a man of colour? Yes, and with his vote he has established beyond question, if there ever was a question, that the MAGA agenda is far more important to him than his own race. It also proves he’s a hypocrite. He got into Yale Law School on an affirmative action quota. He most emphatically is NOT going to send that particular elevator of equality back down to the ‘hood.
What’s more, Thomas dared to quote the Declaration of Independence in his disgraceful support of the majority opinion. “I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States:,” Thomas wrote, “that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.” Justice Thomas seems to have forgotten that Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, was a slave-owning white man, and that the “all men” he was referring to who were “created equal” were rich, land-owning white men.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the first black woman ever to sit on the court — wrote a searing rebuke of Thomas and the majority opinion. She concluded that “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”
The ruling, wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “cements a superficial rule of colourblindness as a constitutional principle in an endemically segregated society where race has always mattered and continues to matter.” She warned that it “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
But this latest erosion of civil rights born of the turbulent sixties has established SCOTUS once again as the enemy of social progress. They will continue to whittle away at American freedoms while MAGA tries to reassert its agenda of fascism.
Let that be another lesson to those who sat out the 2016 election because Bernie was denied the nomination, or because they preferred to throw away their votes on psychopathic morons like Jill Stein: when you open the door to fascism, even a tiny crack, it kicks the door down. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.