Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf
Page Number: 233.0

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

25 

JACKSON, J., dissenting 

an impediment to racial progress—that its own conception
of  the  Fourteenth  Amendment’s  Equal  Protection  Clause 
leaves it no other option—has a wholly self-referential, two-
dimensional  flatness.    The  majority  and  concurring  opin-
ions rehearse this Court’s idealistic vision of racial equality, 
from Brown forward, with appropriate lament for past in-
discretions.  See, e.g., ante, at 11.  But the race-linked gaps
that the law (aided by this Court) previously founded and 
fostered—which  indisputably  define  our  present  reality—
are strangely absent and do not seem to matter. 

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority
pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by 
legal  fiat.  But  deeming  race  irrelevant  in  law  does  not 
make it so in life.  And having so detached itself from this
country’s  actual  past  and  present  experiences,  the  Court
has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work
that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are do-
ing to solve America’s real-world problems.

No  one  benefits  from  ignorance.  Although  formal  race-
linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived 
experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and to-
day’s ruling makes things worse, not better.  The best that 
can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds 
(ostrich-like)  from  the  hope  that  preventing  consideration
of  race  will  end  racism.  But  if  that  is  its  motivation,  the 
majority proceeds in vain.  If the colleges of this country are 
required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go 
away.  It will take longer for racism to leave us.  And, ulti-
mately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.103 

—————— 

103 JUSTICE THOMAS’s prolonged attack, ante, at 49–55 (concurring opin-
ion), responds to a dissent I did not write in order to assail an admissions 
program that is not the one UNC has crafted.  He does not dispute any 
historical  or  present  fact  about  the  origins  and  continued  existence  of 
race-based disparity (nor could he), yet is somehow persuaded that these 
realities  have  no  bearing  on  a  fair  assessment  of  “individual  achieve-