Cite as: 539 U. S. 244 (2003)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
conscious and unconscious, reflecting traditional and unexamined habits of thought, keeps up barriers that must come down if equal opportunity and nondiscrimination are ever genuinely to become this country's law and practice." Id., at 274 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); see generally Krieger, Civil Rights Perestroika: Intergroup Relations After Affirmative Action, 86 Calif. L. Rev. 1251, 1276-1291 (1998).
The Constitution instructs all who act for the government that they may not "deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws." Amdt. 14, § 1. In implementing this equality instruction, as I see it, government decisionmakers may properly distinguish between policies of exclusion and inclusion. See Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Ed., 476 U. S. 267, 316 (1986) (Stevens, J., dissenting). Actions designed to burden groups long denied full citizenship stature are not sensibly ranked with measures taken to hasten the day when entrenched discrimination and its aftereffects have been extirpated. See Carter, When Victims Happen To Be Black, 97 Yale L. J. 420, 433-434 (1988) ("[T]o say that two centuries of struggle for the most basic of civil rights have been mostly about freedom from racial categorization rather than freedom from racial oppressio[n] is to trivialize the lives and deaths of those who have suffered under racism. To pretend . . . that the issue presented in [Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U. S. 265 (1978)] was the same as the issue in [Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954)] is to pretend that history never happened and that the present doesn't exist.").
Our jurisprudence ranks race a "suspect" category, "not because [race] is inevitably an impermissible classification, but because it is one which usually, to our national shame, has been drawn for the purpose of maintaining racial inequality." Norwalk Core v. Norwalk Redevelopment Agency, 395 F. 2d 920, 931-932 (CA2 1968) (footnote omitted). But where race is considered "for the purpose of achieving equality," id., at 932, no automatic proscription is in order.
301
Page: Index Previous 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007