(NewsNation) — In a dissenting opinion Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s decision to upend affirmative action in college admission an “unjustified exercise of power.”
In her opinion, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, Sotomayor quoted Martin Luther King Jr., saying “‘The arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice, despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the case but joined in the dissent.
Sotomayor and Kagan were among the minority on the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down affirmative action policies that allow for the limited use of race as a factor in college acceptance practices.
The decision marks one of the biggest reversals for the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Colleges and universities now must re-examine how they admit students and find other ways to promote and achieve diversity.
Sotomayor criticized Thursday’s ruling, saying it “stands in the way and rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”
“Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal,” Sotomayor wrote.
Her dissent recounted the long history of racism in education, including at Harvard and the University of North Carolina – the institutions at the center of the Supreme Court case.
“Harvard and its donors had extensive financial ties to, and profited from, the slave trade, the labor of enslaved people, and slavery-related investments,” Sotomayor wrote. “As Harvard now recognizes, the accumulation of this wealth was ‘vital to the University’s growth’ and establishment as an elite, national institution.”
Those practices, among other deliberate and racist practices throughout the nation’s history, “place underrepresented minorities multiple steps behind the starting line in the race for college admissions,” Sotomayor wrote.
Undoing affirmative action practices in college admissions, then, can’t erase the “centuries of racial subjugation” that came before Thursday’s ruling, she wrote.
“What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality,” Sotomayor said.
In an official statement, Harvard leadership said they will comply with the Supreme Court’s decision and affirm “the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.”