On June 29, the Christian fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court ruled to end affirmative action policies for admission to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC). Through this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court just delivered a big “fuck you, get back in your place” to Black people as well as to every section of this society that faces systematic discrimination.

Yet all too many people who should know better are acting like this is no big deal or something which can just be “worked around.” Get real!

An immediate result of this ruling is that fewer Black and other oppressed people will be admitted into colleges and universities, especially those that are most “selective.” This will radiate out, decreasing across the board the already miserably small proportion of Black people in the professions and culture and politics.

But the full meaning of this reversal is far greater even than that. It is a leap in ripping away from Black people and others even the pretense of working to overcome centuries of racial oppression and terror. It is an indication of the commanding strength of a fascist movement that, if not stopped, is on track to unleash even worse unbridled white supremacy and terror against Black people and other oppressed people everywhere.

Partial Concessions, Ferocious Backlash

Think about these basic facts. For centuries, Black people endured slavery, then Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terror, and now a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration and systemic discrimination in housing and health care and every other aspect of society.¹ Through most of this time, Black people were not even considered for admission to most universities and colleges at all, or only in very small numbers. North Carolina was a slave state when the U.S. was founded, and when UNC was founded in 1789. It was part of the slavery-defending Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. It has one of the country’s largest populations of Black people. But the first Black student was not admitted to the University of North Carolina until 1955! And that only after a federal court ordered the school to “desegregate.”

Righteous and increasingly ferocious struggles against systematic oppression of Black and other people erupted in this country in the mid-1950s, continuing into the 1960s and 1970s. During the same period, the U.S. ruling class also faced mounting challenges from liberation struggles worldwide, and an imperialist rival (the then Soviet Union) contending for global supremacy. In this context, it began making concessions to Black and other oppressed people. Measures such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed some of the glaring inequalities in society. Affirmative action policies that began in this period compelled universities, local and state governments, employers, and other institutions to admit significant numbers of Black and other oppressed people and women to places that previously had only admitted them in token numbers.

These concessions were far from enough to overcome centuries of oppression. They barely made a dent in overcoming ingrained inequality, much less the white supremacist ideology woven into the system of capitalism. Today, for example, at Harvard, one of the U.S.’s most prestigious universities, Black students make up just over 6% of the students, less than half their proportion in the U.S. population as a whole.

But affirmative action policies like those in college admissions did mark a major change from the past and open the door to dramatic positive changes, even as they were limited. For instance, the number of Black engineering students almost tripled between 1970 and 1985. 

But these policies immediately came under ferocious assault. What a New York Times article called a “decades long backlash against affirmative action” began in 1978. Aggrieved white people, funded and supported by wealthy conservative and fascist foundations, filed a series of lawsuits against affirmative action. Over several decades, Supreme Court rulings steadily chipped away at affirmative action.

Now, a legal ruling from the country’s highest court has sent a message to tens of millions of youths in this country. The discrimination, degradation, and deprivation routinely inflicted on them because of their skin color will not end. A new infusion of racist poison has been injected into a society already grotesquely distorted by hundreds of years of deeply embedded oppression. It is no wonder that the fascist white supremacist-in-chief, Donald Trump, exulted that the decision to end affirmative action marks a “great day for America.”²

Deep Divisions, Fierce Clashes

This decision is a reflection of—and deepens—profound divisions that are tearing at this country and all its institutions, and intensely expressed among the ruling powers. A fascist movement, concentrated in the Republican Party, has been building for decades in this country. It has been fighting to reverse all the concessions of the 1960s. It is determined to tear apart society’s existing norms and establish a fascist form of rule. These fascists are working relentlessly to cohere the U.S. on what Bob Avakian called a “triad of fascism, that is, the unapologetic assertion of white supremacy, male supremacy and American supremacy.... Ignorant and belligerent opposition to science and rational thought, combined with equally ignorant and belligerent assertion of the supposed ‘superiority of western civilization’” reinforces this fascism.

Biden and the Democrats are convinced that cohering this ruthless empire together requires a different multicultural image and social contract—projecting and opening some avenues for diversity and inclusion of some of the oppressed in government, education, and other institutions.³ Barack Obama, when he was first elected president, put it like this: “What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on earth.”

While fascists have been relentlessly moving to establish their control over the courts and the laws, the Democrats have been preaching that everyone shocked and angered by the fascist juggernaut should rely on these very same courts and laws, along with putting your hope in the elections. Democrats and “progressives” who condemn the end of affirmative action are seeking ways to adjust to it, to find ways to work within an even more oppressive “new normal.”

The Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, coming in the wake of the overturning of the right to abortion one year ago, and striking down LGBTQ rights later last week, are flashing billboards that reveal, as Bob Avakian wrote in Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility Of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed. A Necessary Foundation, A Basic Roadmap For This Revolution, that if

“left to itself”—that is, if the current character and dynamics of all this remain on the same course they are now on—this situation, the divisions characterizing it, and the outcome resulting from it are almost certainly going to become even more terribly negative.

These Are Not Normal Times

There is no going back to what has been “normal.” No one should want to, anyway. “Normal” has meant a system of supposedly equal rights built on a foundation of huge, systemic inequalities. “Normal” has meant generations of Black, Brown, and Native American youth in prison, cities emptied of jobs and millions of young people with no future, thousands of people murdered by police, only a tiny fraction of Black youth able to utilize affirmative action even when it existed, and much more. White supremacy has long been “normal” in the law and culture of this country, and that normal is nothing worth returning to.

“Normal” under this system means male supremacy, murderous white supremacy, constant wars and ongoing destruction of the environment. None of this can be resolved in any way approaching positively within the confines of this system. All these atrocities flow from and are perpetuated by the system of capitalism-imperialism. In fact, it will only get worse, no matter whether the Democrats or the Republi-fascists dominate the political leadership.

There is no need to go back to that putrid “normal,” either. A real chance at revolution is developing in this society.

Bob Avakian in his crucially important talk, “SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING,” said that these divisions

cannot be resolved within the framework that has existed, and has held things together, for nearly 150 years, since shortly after the end of the Civil War which led to the abolition of slavery—they cannot be resolved on the basis of the capitalist “democracy” that has been the “normal” means of capitalist rule (dictatorship) for so long.

And further,

as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.

The alternative is a radically new society and government for a whole new emancipating way we could be living that is concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. A cornerstone of that document, and of the society that can be cohered around and flourish under it, is the thorough eradication and uprooting of all forms of oppression, including that of Black and other oppressed people.⁴ A passage on page 51 of this Constitution reads:

In light of the egregious crimes, oppression and injustice perpetrated by the former ruling class and government of the United States of America against various minority nationalities, to give expression to the voluntary union and growing unity of the various peoples within the New Socialist Republic in North America, and to give the most powerful effect to the principles and objectives set forth in this Constitution, discrimination against minority nationalities, in every sphere of society, including segregation in housing, education and other areas, shall be outlawed and prohibited, and concrete measures and steps shall be adopted and carried out, by the government at the central and other levels, to overcome the effects of discrimination and segregation, and the whole legacy of oppression, to which these peoples have been subjected.