- The US Supreme Court has overturned the so-called “Affirmative Action”.
- As a result, Black and Hispanic people in the United States may find it more difficult to get places at universities in the future.
- The conservative majority of the court approved a lawsuit against the University of Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
With the decision, the US Supreme Court is forcing universities to find new ways to reach a diverse student body. As a result, universities and colleges in the USA will no longer be able to take skin color into account in future admission criteria.
The court’s conservative majority overturned the admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public universities, respectively.
Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “wrongly concluded that the touchstone of a person’s identity is not the challenges overcome, the skills acquired or the lessons learned, but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not condone this decision».
However, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “sets back decades of precedent and significant progress”. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black judge, also described the decision as a “tragedy for all of us”.
Decades of practice
The promotion of ethnic minorities under the term “affirmative action” has been a hot topic in the USA for decades. The measures play a central role in debates about structural racism in the USA.
The Supreme Court’s verdict had been eagerly awaited and now means that the right-wing majority of the court has overturned decades of practice.
It should ensure diversity among the students. Civil rights organizations fear that the number of blacks in universities could now be drastically reduced after decades of practice ended.