Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 85

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

37 

THOMAS, J., concurring 

making distinctions based on race had passed.”  Ante, at 13. 
“What was wrong” when the Court decided Brown “in 1954 
cannot be right today.”  Parents Involved, 551 U. S., at 778 
(THOMAS, J., concurring).  Rather, we must adhere to the 
promise of equality under the law declared by the Declara-
tion  of  Independence  and  codified  by  the  Fourteenth
Amendment. 

B 

Respondents and the dissents argue that the universities’ 
race-conscious admissions programs ought to be permitted
because they accomplish positive social goals.  I would have 
thought that history had by now taught a “greater humil-
ity”  when  attempting  to  “distinguish  good  from  harmful
uses of racial criteria.”  Id., at 742 (plurality opinion).  From 
the  Black  Codes,  to  discriminatory  and  destructive  social 
welfare programs, to discrimination by individual govern-
ment  actors,  bigotry  has  reared  its  ugly  head  time  and 
again.  Anyone who today thinks that some form of racial 
discrimination will prove “helpful” should thus tread cau-
tiously, lest racial discriminators succeed (as they once did)
in using such language to disguise more invidious motives.
Arguments for the benefits of race-based solutions have
proved pernicious in segregationist circles.  Segregated uni-
versities  once  argued  that  race-based  discrimination  was 
needed  “to  preserve  harmony  and  peace  and  at  the  same 
time furnish equal education to both groups.”  Brief for Re-
spondents in Sweatt v. Painter, O. T. 1949, No. 44, p. 94; see 
also id., at 79 (“ ‘[T]he mores of racial relationships are such
as to rule out, for the present at least, any possibility of ad-
mitting  white  persons  and  Negroes  to  the  same  institu-
tions’ ”).    And,  parties  consistently  attempted  to  convince 
the  Court  that  the  time  was  not  right  to  disrupt  segrega-
tionist systems.  See Brief for Appellees in McLaurin v. Ok-
lahoma  State  Regents  for  Higher  Ed.,  O. T.  1949,  No.  34, 
p. 12 (claiming that a holding rejecting separate but equal