CNBC reports:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson excoriated her colleagues who voted to strike down race-conscious college admissions policies, accusing the majority of “turning back the clock” on affirmative action.

“With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat,” Jackson wrote in a thundering dissent to the major court ruling Thursday.

“But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” she wrote.

“History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark,” Jackson wrote. [Continue reading…]

Ronald Brownstein writes:

With today’s decision curtailing affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court has landed another powerful blow for older white America in its struggle against the kaleidoscopically diverse and more populous younger generations for control of the nation’s direction.

The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates. Against that backdrop, the decision could widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors. That seems a formula guaranteed to heighten social tension.

“Education is the system that has the most powerful effect on reproducing race, class, and gender differences across generations,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. Banning affirmative action will mean that “the people who govern us, the elites in American society, will increasingly not look like America.” [Continue reading…]