Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 37

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

630, 647 (1993))).

Yet  by  accepting  race-based  admissions  programs  in
which some students may obtain preferences on the basis 
of race alone, respondents’ programs tolerate the very thing
that Grutter foreswore: stereotyping.  The point of respond-
ents’ admissions programs is that there is an inherent ben-
efit in race qua race—in race for race’s sake.  Respondents
admit as much.  Harvard’s admissions process rests on the 
pernicious  stereotype  that  “a  black  student  can  usually 
bring something that a white person cannot offer.”  Bakke, 
438 U. S., at 316 (opinion of Powell, J.) (internal quotation 
marks omitted); see also Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 
92.    UNC  is  much  the  same.    It  argues  that  race  in  itself  
“says [something] about who you are.”  Tr. of Oral Arg. in 
No. 21–707, at 97; see also id., at 96 (analogizing being of a
certain race to being from a rural area). 

We  have  time  and  again  forcefully  rejected  the  notion
that  government  actors  may  intentionally  allocate  prefer-
ence to those “who may have little in common with one an-
other but the color of their skin.”  Shaw, 509 U. S., at 647. 
The  entire  point  of  the  Equal  Protection  Clause  is  that
treating someone differently because of their skin color is 
not like treating them differently because they are from a 
city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly 
or well. 

“One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbid-
den classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth
of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her 
own merit and essential qualities.”  Rice, 528 U. S., at 517. 
But when a university admits students “on the basis of race, 
it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that 
[students] of a particular race, because of their race, think 
alike,” Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900, 911–912 (1995) (in-
ternal quotation marks omitted)—at the very least alike in 
the sense of being different from nonminority students.  In