The Myth of Victimization

History will harshly judge the United States’ prolonged vacillation over whether to honor the Fourteenth Amendment’s command of color-blindness by government actors in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, with the Supreme Court earning much of the blame. Brown vindicated Justice Harlan’s lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which proclaimed that “our Constitution is color-blind.” Yet, it took the Justices 45 years, from Bakke in 1978 to SFFA v. Harvard in 2023, to reject the erroneous notion that racial discrimination in pursuit of “diversity” is acceptable under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws. Granting “preferences” to favored racial groups is invidious discrimination—and therefore unconstitutional.