Affirmative Action Rulings Signal End of Reparations Debate

The recent Supreme Court decisions striking down affirmative action in higher education admissions “effectively sound the death knell for the race-based reparations movement,” declares Project 21 Chairman Horace Cooper.

Horace Cooper

In a commentary published by The Hill, Horace writes:

The Students for Fair Admissions decisions reaffirmed the legal principle that law and government policies must be colorblind. All government programs will now be assessed by what Roberts calls “the Equal Protection Clause’s twin commands: that race may never be used as a ‘negative’ and that it may not operate as a stereotype.”

Government payments made based on someone’s race — also known as reparations — fail this same common-sense test. Reparations advocates publicly call for governments at the local, state and even federal level to make payments with taxpayer dollars only to Black or African American individuals who descended from slaves. Those of all other races would be ineligible.

That means that a government-funded reparations policy would use race to the detriment of some and the benefit of others….

Government may not provide subsidies or bonuses to whites because they are white. By the same token, it cannot deny them subsidies because they are white.

Reparations programs would do exactly that. If put to the test judicially, they should meet the same ill judicial fate as race-based college admissions policies. After all, as Roberts observed, the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause is “universal in [its] application,” and “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Read Horace’s entire commentary here.