Progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) slammed the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action by ruling on cases involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard College.
Warren, Harvard’s most famous Native American scholar posted on Twitter, “An extremist Supreme Court has once again reversed decades of settled law, rolled back the march toward racial justice, and narrowed educational opportunity for all.”
Warren, who previously claimed American Indian ancestry as far back as 1986 when she applied for the State Bar of Texas, was previously a professor at Harvard Law School.
Warren later apologized to the Cherokee Nation in 2019 after a DNA test showed she was as little as 1/1,024 Native American.
In 2012, when Warren first ran for the US Senate, her opponent Scott Brown, alleged that she had claimed Native American ancestry to use as an advantage while seeking employment. Though Warren and Harvard denied that her fabricated heritage gave her any advantages in her education or career, her then-employer Harvard Law School from 1995 to 2004 listed Warren as a Native American in federal affirmative action forms.
According to the decision, in Grutter vs Bollinger, which allowed the use of a person’s race as a factor in college admissions, “imposed one final limit on race-based admissions programs: At some point, the Court held, they must end.”
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said at the time of the Grutter ruling that “25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further” a school’s desire for a diverse student body.
The majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts stated, “Twenty years have passed since Grutter, with no end to race-based college admissions in sight. But the Court has permitted race-based college admissions only within the confines of narrow restrictions: such admissions
programs must comply with strict scrutiny, may never use race as a stereotype or negative, and must — at some point — end. Respondents’ admissions systems fail each of these criteria and must therefore be invalidated under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Approved ~ FS