Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 69

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

21 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

special  treatment—rather,  all  citizens  were  meant  to  be 
treated  the  same  as  those  who,  at  the  time,  had  the  full 
rights of citizenship.  Other provisions of the 1866 Act rein-
force  this  view,  providing  for  equality  in  civil  rights.    See 
Rappaport 97.  Most notably, §14 stated that the basic civil
rights  of  citizenship  shall  be  secured  “without  respect  to 
race  or  color.”  14  Stat.  176–177.    And,  §8  required  that 
funds  from  land  sales  must  be  used  to  support  schools
“without distinction of color or race, . . . in the parishes of ” 
the area where the land had been sold.  Id., at 175. 

In addition to these federal laws, Harvard also points to 
two  state  laws:  a  South  Carolina  statute  that  placed  the 
burden of proof on the defendant when a “colored or black” 
plaintiff  claimed  a  violation,  1870  S. C.  Acts  pp. 387–388, 
and Kentucky legislation that authorized a county superin-
tendent to aid “negro paupers” in Mercer County, 1871 Ky.
Acts  pp. 273–274.    Even  if  these  statutes  provided  race-
based  benefits,  they  do  not  support  respondents’  and 
JUSTICE  SOTOMAYOR’s  view  that  the  Fourteenth  Amend-
ment was contemporaneously understood to permit differ-
ential treatment based on race, prohibiting only caste leg-
islation  while  authorizing  antisubordination  measures.
Cf., e.g., O. Fiss, Groups and the Equal Protection Clause,
5 Philos. & Pub. Aff. 107, 147 (1976) (articulating the anti-
subordination view); R. Siegel, Equality Talk: Antisubordi-
nation  and  Anticlassification  Values  in  Constitutional 
Struggles Over Brown, 117 Harv. L. Rev. 1470, 1473, n. 8 
(2004) (collecting scholarship).  At most, these laws would 
support  the  kinds  of  discrete  remedial  measures  that  our 
precedents have permitted.

If services had been given only to white persons up to the
Fourteenth  Amendment’s  adoption,  then  providing  those 
same  services  only  to  previously  excluded  black  persons
would work to equalize treatment against a concrete base-
line of government-imposed inequality.  It thus may have
been  the  case  that  Kentucky’s  county-specific,  race-based