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

Adam Mortara on the End of the Racial Preferences in College Admission

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 dominance 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 he anticipates this powerful elite consensus to play out in the post-SFFA era