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16  STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT 

AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE 
THOMAS, J., concurring 

The  Court  thus  made  clear  that  the  Fourteenth  Amend-
ment’s equality guarantee applied to members of all races, 
including  Asian  Americans,  ensuring  all  citizens  equal
treatment under law. 

Seven  years  later,  the  Court  relied  on  the  Slaughter-
House view to conclude that “[t]he words of the [Fourteenth
A]mendment . . . contain a necessary implication of a posi-
tive immunity, or right, most valuable to the colored race,—
the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against 
them distinctively as colored.”  Strauder v. West Virginia, 
100 U. S. 303, 307–308 (1880).  The Court thus found that 
the Fourteenth Amendment banned “expres[s]” racial clas-
sifications, no matter the race affected, because these clas-
sifications  are  “a  stimulant  to  . . .  race  prejudice.”    Id.,  at 
308.  See also ante, at 10–11.  Similar statements appeared
in  other  cases  decided  around  that  time.    See  Virginia  v. 
Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880) (“The plain object of these
statutes  [enacted  to  enforce  the  Fourteenth  Amendment],
as of the Constitution which authorized them, was to place
the colored race, in respect of civil rights, upon a level with
whites.  They made the rights and responsibilities, civil and 
criminal, of the two races exactly the same”); Ex parte Vir-
ginia, 100 U. S. 339, 344–345 (1880) (“One great purpose of 
[the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments] was to raise 
the colored race from that condition of inferiority and servi-
tude in which most of them had previously stood, into per-
fect equality of civil rights with all other persons within the 
jurisdiction of the States”).

This Court’s view of the Fourteenth Amendment reached 
its  nadir  in  Plessy,  infamously  concluding  that  the  Four-
teenth Amendment “could not have been intended to abol-
ish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as dis-
tinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the
two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”  163 U. S., 
at 544.  That holding stood in sharp contrast to the Court’s 
earlier  embrace  of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment’s  equality