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10  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
JACKSON, J., dissenting 

middle-class America” (by giving $95 billion to veterans and 
their families between 1944 and 1971) was “deliberately de-
signed to accommodate Jim Crow.”41  So, too, will I bypass
how  Black  people  were  prevented  from  partaking  in  the
consumer credit market—a market that helped White peo-
ple who could access it build and protect wealth.42  Nor will 
time  and  space  permit  my  elaborating  how  local  officials’ 
racial hostility meant  that even those benefits that  Black 
people  could  formally  obtain  were  unequally  distributed 
along racial lines.43  And I could not possibly discuss every 
way in which, in light of this history, facially race-blind pol-
icies still work race-based harms today (e.g., racially dispar-
ate tax-system treatment; the disproportionate location of
toxic-waste facilities in Black communities; or the deliber-
ate  action  of  governments  at  all  levels  in  designing  inter-
state highways to bisect and segregate Black urban commu-
nities).44 

The point is this: Given our history, the origin of persis-
tent race-linked gaps should be no mystery.  It has never 
been a deficiency of Black Americans’ desire or ability to, in
Frederick  Douglass’s  words,  “stand  on  [their]  own  legs.”45 
Rather,  it  was  always  simply  what  Justice  Harlan  recog-
nized 140 years ago—the persistent and pernicious denial
of “what had already been done in every State of the Union 
for the white race.”  Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S., at 61 (dis-
senting opinion). 

—————— 

41 Katznelson 113–114; see id., at 113–141; see also, e.g., id., at 139– 
140 (Black veterans, North and South, were routinely denied loans that
White veterans received); Rothstein 167.

42 Baradaran 112–113. 
43 Katznelson 22–23; Rothstein 167. 
44 Id., at 54–56, 65, 127–131, 217; Stanford Institute for Economic Pol-
icy Research, Measuring and Mitigating Disparities in Tax Audits 1–7 
(2023); Dickerson 1096–1097. 

45 What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Mas-
sachusetts, on 26 January 1865, in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 68
(J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991).