Supreme Court Says All Americans Aren’t Created Equal
The Founding Fathers didn’t believe the concept when they put their names to it. Many Americans today don’t either.
Proponents for affirmative action in higher education rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North AmericaJust in time for the Fourth of July, the US Supreme Court curtailed the ability of universities to use race as a factor in admissions. Many American universities have employed affirmative action not only as a specific recipe for diverse student bodies, but in an effort to bolster equality more generally in a stubbornly unequal America. The court’s Republican majority decided that such programs violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The court ruled, in effect, that more equal is less fair.
Equality has always been a fraught concept. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had the temerity to declare that “all men are created equal,” a statement that the slave owner from Virginia neither believed nor pretended to – at least not outside the rhetorical borders of the Declaration. Stanford University historian Jack Rakove maintains that Jefferson meant that the colonists “as a people” had a right to self-government that was equal to the right of other peoples. But given the scarcity of self-government circa 1776, even that seems a curiously expansive framework.