"With this ruling, the Supreme Court has chosen to ignore our nation’s history and jeopardize our youth’s future. The decision was entirely expected from this conservative court, but still extremely hard to hear, and to reckon with its implications on the fight for racial equity, diversity, and justice. The march forward on these issues has been painfully slow, but largely forward– now the court is pulling us back, creating the conditions for young people of more color today to have less opportunities than the generation before them. Students with a legacy of systemic privilege or power may see its benefits, students confronting a legacy of systemic racism and discrimination will see only barriers.
"In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that ‘Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal… Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.’ It’s clear that conservatives want to ignore race when it is convenient to do so, and ignore reality when it is inconvenient to their philosophy and policy goals. While Republican lawmakers attempt to remove our history of racial injustice from the classroom, conservative justices are trying to remove racial equity from classrooms altogether."