The Supreme Court heard two cases this term challenging the use of race as one of many factors in considering student applications for admission to Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Affirmative action was a concession forced from the rulers of this society—the capitalist-imperialist class—by the massive struggle in the 1960s against the oppression of Black and other oppressed nationality people that is built into American society. Affirmative action programs resulted in significantly more Black and other students of oppressed nationalities, as well as women, being admitted into higher education institutions—many of which were virtually all-white. (In 1959, Harvard University had 18 Black freshmen—1.5% of the class!). The upcoming Supreme Court rulings are widely expected to completely overturn 50 years of established practice on affirmative action, even at private colleges such as Harvard, practices which had been upheld by earlier Supreme Court rulings.

This is completely illegitimate.

By putting affirmative action into law in the 1960s and ’70s, the federal government was being forced to acknowledge in a small way that for centuries, this country and its institutions had discriminated against Black, Latino and other oppressed people—and that particularly in higher education, there needed to be “affirmative” steps taken to address this. Since then affirmative action has been attacked and chipped away at (similar to how the right to abortion was attacked and chipped away at after the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision making it legal nationwide). This has been tantamount to the legal reinstitution and reinforcement of discrimination and overt white supremacy.¹

But up to this point, affirmative action has still been upheld as constitutional. Previous court decisions upheld it as a way to achieve diversity on campuses, and then NOT even as a way to redress past discrimination. If the Supreme Court now outlaws affirmative action outright, this will be a major step backward—a major ATTACK—on Black and other oppressed people in many dimensions: hiring, access to educational opportunities and housing, representation on juries, etc.

Many anticipate that the fascist super-majority on the Supreme Court will overturn affirmative action in the name of a “colorblind Constitution,” as the plaintiffs (those arguing against affirmative action) in the current cases argue. First of all, the U.S. Constitution was never “color-blind.” Color-blind? Not only was the enslavement and literal sale of African and then African-American people deemed “constitutional,” the U.S. Supreme Court went so far as to rule in the Dred Scott case that a Black person “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” Color-blind? This Constitution was the legal foundation for Black people being held in brutal conditions akin to slavery, generation after generation, after a short 10-year Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Color-blind? This exploiters’ Constitution justified segregating schools by race for nearly a century. If the fascist justices now on the Supreme Court were the least bit honest about what they are doing, they would wear their white robes and Klan hats to the session where they announce their decision!

As Bob Avakian has said in discussing the actual treatment of Black people in this country, from slavery to Jim Crow and now to the situation today: “In terms of depravity, you can’t find anything Hitler and the Nazis did that was worse than this.” (From “AMERICA: Truly a Model—of Depraved RACIST GENOCIDE”)

The expected decision on affirmative action is only one part of a larger legal offensive likely to come down in a series of Supreme Court decisions over the next few weeks. Stay tuned to revcom.us, which will cover these decisions as they come down.

One last point: The shock of this decision after the beautiful uprising after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor raises yet again what it will take to actually put an end to the oppression of Black and other oppressed people. The proclamation WE ARE THE REVCOMS makes it clear that the U.S. Constitution is nothing but an exploiters’ vision of freedom in contrast to the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, which aims to dig up the roots of the oppression of Black and all oppressed people here and around the world. 

Over these next few weeks, revcoms should be seizing the opening to compare that instrument of exploitation and oppression, the U.S. Constitution, to the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, and should very explicitly make sure that people get exposed to the orientation and program of THIS Constitution to eradicate the oppression of Black and other oppressed nationality as one critical example of the society that millions need to be mobilized to fight for.