The Supreme Court Being What It Is

The affirmative action decision was always the end game

The U.S. Supreme Court, despite what you and many others might believe, has never been a friend of African Americans or persons of color in America. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision was just more of the same. If you disagree, fight me. Challenge me.

Here are a few dingers:

Johnson v. McIntosh — 1823

This is the case about colonialism, imperialism, and European expansion — manifest destiny. The court codified the Papal Bulls (decrees from the Pope) of the 15th century, declaring people of color (Indigenous people) as less than human and pagans (non-Christian). For that reason, the rights of white Christians were forever superior to the rights of Indigenous people; basically, they could be robbed, killed, and pillaged (also enslaved).

The Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Marshall writing the opinion, wrote of Native American rights to hand the following:

“the rights of the original inhabitants were, in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired. They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it…but their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.”

The last line is the key: because Europeans had arrived and discovered what the Indigenous population had, the Europeans now owned it superior to anyone else.

Dred Scott v. Sanford — 1857

Everyone calls this the white supremacy case.

Cornell Law School: “The Court reasoned that, at the time of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, persons of African descent were brought to the U.S. as property, and, whether later freed or not, could not become U.S. citizens.”

Justice Roger Taney wrote famously in the opinion that Dred Scott, the African suing for his freedom and citizenship, could never become a citizen and possessed no rights that White people were bound to respect. There is little that can be done to make amends for this horrific legal opinion. The decision led to John Brown’s raid and the Civil War a few years later. It is white supremacy on steroids.

Civil Rights Act of 1875 case — (1883)

After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The law enfranchised African Americans as never before. The law provided for “equality of all men before the law” and prohibited racial discrimination in public places and facilities such as restaurants and public transportation. The law also made it a crime for anyone to facilitate the denial of such accommodations or services on the basis of colour, race, or “previous condition of servitude.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8–1 vote, affirmed white male supremacy with the decision.

Korematsu

Japanese Internment camps 1942 — ruled constitutional by US Supreme Court — Public Domain photo

In this case, U.S. Supreme Court held it was constitutional for President Franklin Roosevelt to imprison Japanese — Americans in internment camps in the U.S. (see photo above). The case is an abomination. Thousands of Japanese-Americans received reparations as a result of Roosevelt’s order and the failure of the Court to stop him.

Shelby v. Alabama (2010)

A modern-day Voting Rights Act disaster, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by getting rid of Section 5, the preclearance part of the law. States who were about to make changes to their voting laws had to get preclearance from the U.S. Department of Justice. The law was passed because African Americans nationwide, especially in the former Confederate states, were denied the right to cast votes in elections with all kinds of racist obstacles. Section 5 changed because the states had to get approved first to make changes. In Shelby, the U.S. Supreme Court went back to the old system and now lets many of these states make all sorts of changes. Immediately following the decision in the case, the same states that sort to stop African Americans from voting started throwing obstacles in the way.

The current madness

And now, in the affirmative action cases, the U.S. Supreme Court does what it has always done to African Americans: treat them as if they have just landed in America. It is just more of the same.

For just a little while, an overrated remedial program called affirmative action gave a tiny number of people a real opportunity unavailable to them historically. The U.S. Supreme Court got rid of it. Justice Kentaji Brown, in oral argument, hinted at what was coming at America yet again:

“I don’t think we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem, because I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution, at what the framers and the founders thought about, and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, in a race conscious way.”

These cases are just a smidgen of the racism that always bubbles over in U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence. While the Court is only one branch of government in America, it is often cited as the branch that has changed things. This is hardly true, as we are witnessing. For the most part, except for the “Warren Court” under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court is a white male supremacist Court. Even decisions in favor of African Americans, such as Brown v. Board of Education, are watered-down consensus opinions explicitly written to maintain the racial status quo.

And today is no different. The U.S. Supreme Court did what it always has done historically. It has preserved white male supremacy. I am not surprised. My advice: act accordingly in the future. Assume no good will come from that place because it won’t. Even cases with positive results are not positive because it is preposterous the Court decide something so obviously moral and correct.

But this is the U.S. Supreme Court. Roger Taney’s Court and the Court of William Rehnquist. The court of a long line of white supremacists. The conservative majority is doing what it was created to do: conserve the racist ideology it is the basis of its existence.

Do you know any others? Please comment and list them below; it would be appreciated.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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Photo credit: Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision of 1857 indoctrinating white supremacy into American life again.