"I don't want to go down in history as the guy who killed affirmative action. I actually said that to him. "

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Back in 2018, Adam Mortara repeatedly told Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison Burroughs that the case he was arguing sought to prove that Harvard had discriminated against Asian Americans, not to end the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Last week, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court made scant reference to the underlying district court case in the course of ruling that the use of race as a factor in college admissions was constitutionally impermissible.

The landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard University provides an authoritative declaration by the highest court in the land that the United States has a colorblind constitution. The declaration arrives at the very moment when the critique of colorblindness has obtained hegemony within our educational and cultural apparatuses, serving as the predicate for a cascade of increasingly brazen violations of civil rights law undertaken by schools, governments, hospitals, and major corporations. I talk to Mortara about how we got from the original district court case to the end of affirmative action and whether the powerful elite consensus generative of so much lawless action in recent years will be brought to heel by this ruling.

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