Nikole Hannah-Jones Rejects Color Blindness

Nikole Hannah-Jones in her recent New York Times Magazine essay, “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap,” laments the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are unconstitutional. The nearly five-decade-old policy of affirmative action is now unconstitutional. And rightly so. It took a majority of the justices on the Court much too long to understand what Justice John Marshall Harlan understood in 1896 in his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the dissent, Harlan clearly explained the relationship between color-blind principles and the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Hannah-Jones goes to great lengths to show that the jurisprudence of transition to a color-blind approach to the application of law is detrimental to race relations, and especially to the descendants of American slavery — black Americans. She does this by giving a rather quick and highly selective reading of the 14th Amendment and its equal-protection clause. Her ultimate position is that the use of race-conscious policies for addressing the negative social and material effects of slavery suffered by black Americans is consistent with the spirit and letter of the 14th Amendment.

Nikole Hannah-Jones in her recent New York Times Magazine essay, “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap,” laments the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are unconstitutional. The nearly five-decade-old policy of affirmative action is now unconstitutional. And rightly so. It took a majority of the justices on the Court much too long to understand what Justice John Marshall Harlan understood in 1896 in his lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. In the dissent, Harlan clearly explained the relationship between color-blind principles and the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Hannah-Jones goes to great lengths to show that the jurisprudence of transition to a color-blind approach to the application of law is detrimental to race relations, and especially to the descendants of American slavery — black Americans. She does this by giving a rather quick and highly selective reading of the 14th Amendment and its equal-protection clause. Her ultimate position is that the use of race-conscious policies for addressing the negative social and material effects of slavery suffered by black Americans is consistent with the spirit and letter of the 14th Amendment.