Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson criticize each other in unusually sharp language

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Washington CNN

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Thursday on affirmative action pitted its two black justices against each other, with the ideologically opposed jurists using unusually sharp language attacking each other by name.

The majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts said colleges and universities can no longer consider race as a specific basis for granting admission, saying the Harvard and Carolina University programs North violated the equal protection clause because they did not offer measurable goals. to justify the use of race.

Judge Clarence Thomas and the other four conservative courts agreed with Roberts’ opinion. But Thomas, who in 1991 became the second black person to make the top court in the land, issued a lengthy deal that attacked those admissions programs and tore up arguments made by liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to join the court, who wrote her own fiery dissent in the case.

Thomas has previously acknowledged that he came to Yale Law School through affirmative action, but he has long been critical of those policies. He spoke in personal terms in his agreement making his case against the use of the policies, which he described as rudderless racial preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their incoming classes.

Even in the segregated South where I grew up, individuals were not the sum of their skin color, Thomas wrote.

While I am painfully aware of the social and economic devastation that has befallen my race and all who suffer from discrimination, he added, I have an enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly set out in the declaration of independence and the Constitution. of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and should be treated equally before the law.

As he read his endorsement from the bench on Thursday, Jackson, who joined the court last year, stared intently ahead. Although Judge Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, Jackson did not read her own dissent, in which she went after Thomas agreed and accused the majority of having an unconscious letting go of a cake in the way the decision heralded color blindness for all by legal decree.

A footnote near the end of Jackson’s dissent went after Thomas agreed, liberal justice accusing his colleague of demonstrating an obsession with racial consciousness that far exceeds my holistic understanding or that of UNC. that race can be a factor that affects candidates’ unique life experiences.

Judge Thomas inflames too many straw men to list or completely extinguish them here, Jackson wrote. The takeaway is that those who demand that no one think about race (a classic pink elephant paradox) refuse to see, let alone solve for the elephant in the room, the race-related disparities that continue to hinder the realization of our great Nations full potential.

In his broader dissent, Jackson said the challengers’ argument that affirmative action programs are unfair flashes both history and reality too many to count.

But the answer is simple: our country has never been colorblind, Jackson said.

(While Jackson recused herself from the Harvard case, she heard the UNC case and her dissent focused on the latter.)

Thomas then explicitly attacks Jackson’s opinion.

According to her, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historic subjugation of black Americans still determining our lives today, Thomas wrote.

Worse still, Judge Jackson is using her sweeping observations on the statistical relationships between race and certain measures of health, wealth and well-being to label all black people as victims, Thomas wrote at another point in her agreement. . His desire to do so is unfathomable to me.

03:02 – Source: CNN

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Thomas, one of the more conservative members of the courts, has long been known for his distaste for affirmative action policies. He has been open that he came to Yale through affirmative action, but says the stigma of preferential treatment has made it difficult for him to find a job after college.

In his memoir, My Grandfathers Son, Thomas says he felt cheated by paternalistic white people at Yale who recruited black students.

After graduating from Yale, I met a black alumnus of the University of Michigan Law School who told me he insisted on not mentioning his race on his application. I wished with all my heart that I had done the same, he wrote.

I learned the hard way that a Yale law degree meant one thing for white graduates and another for black people, no matter how much anyone denied it, Thomas wrote. As a symbol of my disillusionment, I peeled off a fifteen cent price sticker from a pack of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind me of the mistake I had made in going to Yale.

He dissented in Grutter v. Bollinger of 2003, which allowed for the limited use of race in college admissions.

I believe that black people can succeed in all avenues of American life without the interference of university administrators, he wrote in his dissent.

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