"The Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases seeking to end race-based affirmative action in higher education. The group Students for Fair Admissions is challenging the admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. Because Harvard is private, it isn’t governed by the rules of Constitution, so SFFA is suing the university under the federal civil rights statute Title VI. They are suing the University of North Carolina under both Title VI and the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Previous posts have addressed the suit against Harvard so this post will focus on the suit against UNC.
In a 2003 case called Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that universities can use race as a factor in admissions as long as they don’t use racial quotas and have a good faith educational theory for why they take race into account. SFFA begins their petition to the Court by framing the issue as “Should this Court overrule Grutter v. Bollinger, and hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions?”
[SFFA] quotes Chief Justice Roberts as writing: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race”. They quote the Court’s only African Justice, Clarence Thomas as writing: “Every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.” And they quote the late Justice Antonin Scalia as writing: “Discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2022/01/24/the-supreme-court-gets-ready-to-end-affirmative-action/?sh=6a831e3a5e38