Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 217

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

9 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

“chartered, insured, and regulated savings and loan associ-
ations from the early years of the New Deal.”35  But it did 
“not oppose the denial of mortgages to African Americans
until 1961” (and even then opposed discrimination ineffec-
tively).36 

The upshot of all this is that, due to government policy
choices, “[i]n the suburban-shaping years between 1930 and 
1960, fewer than one percent of all mortgages in the nation
were issued to African Americans.”37  Thus, based on their 
race, Black people were “[l]ocked out of the greatest mass-
based  opportunity  for  wealth  accumulation  in  American 
history.”38 

For present purposes, it is significant that, in so exclud-
ing  Black  people,  government  policies  affirmatively  oper-
ated—one could say, affirmatively acted—to dole out pref-
erences to those who, if nothing else, were not Black.  Those 
past preferences carried forward and are reinforced today
by (among other things) the benefits that flow to homeown-
ers and to the holders of other forms of capital that are hard 
to obtain unless one already has assets.39 

This discussion of how the existing gaps were formed is 
merely  illustrative,  not  exhaustive.    I  will  pass  over  Con-
gress’s  repeated  crafting  of  family-,  worker-,  and  retiree-
protective  legislation  to  channel  benefits  to  White  people, 
thereby excluding Black Americans from what was other-
wise  “a  revolution  in  the  status  of  most  working  Ameri-
cans.”40  I will also skip how the G. I. Bill’s “creation of . . . 
—————— 

35 Id., at 108. 
36 Ibid. 
37 R.  Schragger,  The  Limits  of  Localism,  100  Mich.  L. Rev.  371,  411, 

n. 144 (2001); see also Rothstein 182–183. 

38 Oliver & Shapiro 18. 
39 Id.,  at  43–44;  Baradaran  109,  253–254;  A.  Dickerson,  Shining  a 
Bright Light on the Color of Wealth, 120 Mich. L. Rev. 1085, 1100 (2022) 
(Dickerson).

40 Katznelson 53; see id., at 22, 29, 42–48, 53–61; Rothstein 31, 155– 

156.