Editor’s note: This may be the last newsletter for a while. I’m taking an RV out west for most of July and will have little access to internet. If I have occasion to post, I will (I still have a lot to say), but don’t count on it. When I return, I’m going to move the blog to Substack. For years, Facebook and Twitter drove most of the traffic to PoliticsNC. Today, they share very few of my posts. I could write a post about that. Substack’s model tries to drive reader growth and I want to recover some of the audience I’ve lost. There will be some changes, but I’ll talk about that when I get back. Have a good summer. 

The Supreme Court ruled that colleges cannot consider race as a criteria for admissions, ending the practice known as affirmative action in college admissions. It’s part of conservative philosophy that believes we live in a color-blind society, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Conservatives claim that affirmative action discriminates against White people and, in the court’s decision, Asian people. It’s a core component of the GOP’s victim mentality. 

Affirmative action was part of a series of actions taken to reverse the damage done by centuries of state-sponsored discrimination and terror. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 was also part of that toolbox. The Supreme Court has now ended them both in the name of their fictitious color-blind society. If ending the VRA is any precedent, we’re about to see progress toward racial equality take a hit. 

In the wake of the decisions to end key portions of the Voting Rights Act, Republican-controlled legislatures took measures meant to restrict voting among African Americans. They claimed they passed the measures to prevent voter fraud, but the target was the Black community, making the actions even more reprehensible since they implied African Americans disproportionally committed election fraud. They never talked about fraud until Barack Obama was elected president, suggesting that he was illegitimate, a prelude to Trump’s Big Lie. 

In states that ended affirmative action in admissions decisions, African American enrollment plummeted. According to Axios, the percentage of Black students at the University of Michigan has dropped by almost half since the state ended affirmative action in 2006. In California, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students dropped by 40% at the state’s top universities after the ended affirmative action. 

The court’s ruling is part of a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the progress the country has made toward racial justice. Conservatives have been arguing that once laws were in place to end state-sanctioned discrimination (laws they opposed) that racism would disappear and that African Americans were not owed anything for their 350 years of treatment as property or partial citizens. The court’s decisions on race offer a veneer of respectability to a strain of reactionary politics with roots that go back to our country’s founding but whose modern form took shape in the aftermath of the Civil War when former Confederates successfully kept African Americans from participating in the broader civic and economic life. 

African Americans were banned from attending UNC and Harvard for far longer than have been allowed to attend. More importantly, they were prevented, by law, from accessing the tools necessary to go to those institutions in the first place. The result kept them out of key decision making positions in politics, business, and education. Unlike other immigrant groups that were encouraged to assimilate into American society, African Americans were systematically denied the opportunity until 60 years ago despite a presence here for more than 400 years. 

The current court is made up of Trumpists in robes. They embody a political and judicial philosophy that ignores and denies the damage our laws and government did to the culture of people forced to come here against their will. They are the judicial descendants of the justices who wrote the Dred Scott  and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions that allowed governments to deny African Americans access to the freedoms other citizens enjoyed. 

The legacy of separate but equal and Jim Crow can still be seen throughout the South today. Here in North Carolina, it’s no accident that areas most impacted by hurricanes and flooding are disproportionally inhabited by African Americans. They were relegated to the lowlands while the high land was reserved for White landowners. Small towns, and even our cities, have clear declinations between White sides of town and Black sides of town. One is marked with sidewalks, curbs and gutters, and street lights. The other is defined by crumbling roads and lack of basic infrastructure. Discrepancies in income, wealth, and education are the direct result of laws passed by legislatures and upheld by the courts to prevent African Americans from enjoying the same freedoms as White citizens. 

Affirmative action may be an imperfect tool, but it’s an attempt to address wrongs that were far more grievous yet accepted and codified by our government and society. Conservatives who downplay the lasting impact of systematic damage to Black culture, especially in the South, hide behind an ideology that denies justice to protect an unequal status quo. It’s not a coincidence that the White Supremacists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and new-Nazis align themselves with Donald Trump and the modern GOP. They are allies of the Roberts court and part of the reactionary movement that defines the Republican Party today.