How Japanese Internment Led to Theft of Black Folk’s Right to Equality

In America, the oppression of one racial minority bleeds into the oppression of another.

And we should blame first a Supreme Court that has smothered the nation in ignorance. Incompetence. Malice. This holds true for various reasons, including how the institution has interpreted, or more accurately misinterpreted, the Constitution’s guarantee of equality.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause demands the welcoming of all, on the same level, into We the People. It reads: “No state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The justices have somehow manipulated that clause into words that strengthen America’s racial caste system: A racial hierarchy enforced through law, rules, and norms that confines the Black population into a subordinate legal, political, and social status, from womb to grave.

Since the colonial era, an ideological spirit that sets the primacy of the White population as an objective has haunted this land. I call it caste preservationism.

In Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, the Supreme Court declared that the Equal Protection Clause forbade segregation. Then, in the 1960s, Congress passed forceful civil and voting rights laws, laws seemingly mighty enough to dethrone White supremacy.

America, if you squinted hard enough, appeared like one tiptoeing out of the dusk of racial apartheid and into the dawn of a casteless society. Some among those who aim to destroy the racial caste system, caste abolitionists, smiled as though ultimate success felt close enough to touch.

But defeat in Brown inspired caste preservationists, those striving to maintain the racial caste system, to hatch a game-plan to transform the Equal Protection Clause into a tool to conserve a White-over-Black world. 

In this video, you will learn about their theft of equal protection, what I detail in my book Their Accomplices Wore Robes. 

How did the Supreme Court come to interpret the Equal Protection Clause in the exact way necessary to impede Black progress?

This video concludes with one of the most disturbingly moronic opinions ever penned by a Chief Justice. No opinion, when researching my book, infuriated me more than the one that ends this video. 

We start, though, with among the most shameful chapters of twentieth century America.

Part I.

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Those of Japanese ancestry in America—alien and citizen alike—understood that war with the empire would upend their world.

In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that empowered military leaders to divide America into zones, and subject suspected threats therein to curfews and removal. 

First came West coast curfew orders applying to all persons of Japanese ancestry. Then followed exclusion orders for their internment.

At first, Gordon Hirabayashi, an American citizen, obeyed the curfew order. When the University of Washington senior was studying at the library at night, classmates would say, “Gordon, it’s five to eight,” reminding him the curfew order required him to remain home from eight at night until six in the morning. 

He would then race to his dormitory. But one night he thought, “I can’t do that. I have to change my philosophy or I can’t do this, or I’m not true to myself, and if I’m not, I’m not a very good citizen to anybody.”

Gordon began defying the curfew order.

Then, posted exclusion orders appeared throughout Seattle.

In May 1942, Hirabayashi presented his personal statement “Why I refuse to Register for Evacuation” to the local FBI office. “I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives,” he wrote. “Therefore, I must refuse this order for evacuation.”

Violating the curfew and exclusion orders placed handcuffs around his wrists.

Fred Korematsu, a twenty-three-year-old Japanese American from the Northern California, likewise disobeyed the exclusion order. “I could not understand how the United States Government could do this to American citizens, who were interned while Americans of German and Italian descent were allowed to be free.”

A police officer stopped Korematsu on the street and threw him in jail. Meanwhile, 120,000 souls of Japanese ancestry, more than two-thirds American citizens, languished in concentration camps.

Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s cases reached the Supreme Court, tasking the justices with evaluating whether the curfew and exclusion orders violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Let’s discuss how judges approach such legal questions. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause has fortified the racial caste system. How?

You must know the rules to appreciate how caste preservationists exploited them. And what emboldened a Chief Justice to author that disturbingly moronic opinion.

Part II.

When determining whether to invalidate a law, courts often use tests. If the law passes the test, it survives. If it fails the test, it dies. And when the government invades your fundamental rights, courts apply a very rigorous test. 

Makes sense right? If the government snatches away something central to your humanity, something central your freedom, courts should force power to justify itself.

For example:

On June 1, 1942, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. The case concerned the Oklahoma Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act. Jack T. Skinner, convicted four times of theft crimes, resisted Oklahoma’s intention to sterilize him. The law, he complained, violated the Equal Protection Clause.

How tough of a test should the justices have applied? Because sterilization affected Skinner’s right to reproduce, deemed fundamental, they applied “strict scrutiny,” the toughest test.

The law, the Court concluded, failed strict scrutiny because Oklahoma’s legislature lacked a compelling reason for not treating like things alike. The state could sterilize a grand larcenist but not an embezzler. 

Basically, the same crime.

“When the law lays an unequal hand on those who have committed intrinsically the same quality of offense and sterilizes one and not the other,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a unanimous decision, “it has made as invidious a discrimination as if it had selected a particular race or nationality for oppressive treatment.” 

Should the Court have applied strict scrutiny in Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s cases? And if so, why?

The Court’s answers revealed a deficient understanding of racial oppression. And caste preservationists later gathered up all that deficient understanding and stuffed it into their arguments that supported their theft of equal protection. 

If this video has taught you something, give it a like. This is the second video in a series on the theft of equal protection. Subscribe and hit the alarm bell to get notified when I drop the next one. 

Part III

On June 21, 1943, the Supreme Court decided Hirabayashi v. United States. Hirabayashi was convicted of violating the curfew and exclusion orders, receiving two ninety-day sentences to run concurrently. 

Please understand that internment culminated decades of anti-Japanese lawmaking.

Early Japanese immigrants shoved their hands into West coast soil and farmed it with practices from their homeland. Their success unnerved White folk who grew increasingly scared about the potential disruption of the region’s social and economic order. Politicians appeased them by enacting state and federal laws that curbed Japanese emigration. New laws also prohibited Japanese aliens from purchasing land. This scheme confined persons of Japanese ancestry to a lower caste and protected White racial advantages.

I call these sorts of actions castework: caste-producing and -sustaining laws, policies, and actions. Castework helps build and maintain a caste system.

In Their Accomplices Wore Robes, I argue that the Equal Protection Clause grants the right to freedom from caste. The Fourteenth Amendment, a sweet rose, blossomed from the seed that the anti-slavery movement had planted decades before the Civil War. A movement that regarded equality as the opposite of caste.

Steeped in abolitionist literature, I wrote, “The Equal Protection Clause guarantees that no state shall allow any individual to belong to a lower caste.” The state affords you equal protection when it prevents you from experiencing treatment as a member of a degraded group. Caste mustn’t exist in a nation with equal protection.

Therefore, when deciding whether to apply strict scrutiny in equal protection cases, courts should ask a simple question: Does the action in question help build or maintain a caste system? Is it castework? If the answer is no, strict scrutiny should not apply. And courts should just use an easier test that allows more laws to survive. 

The Court should have regarded the curfew and the exclusion orders as the most recent and egregious instances of anti-Japanese castework.

The Supreme Court could have held—should have held—that since the orders exemplify castework, they must pass strict scrutiny, a test the orders should surely fail. Instead, Chief Justice Harlan Stone, writing the unanimous opinion, reasoned that because of the Second World War, residents of Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship, might subvert national interests.

The Court upheld the curfew order as a war necessity without subjecting it to strict scrutiny. The justices did not review the exclusion order because even if the exclusion order was struck down, Hirabayashi would still have to serve his sentence for the curfew violation.

Stone did write, though, that “[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. For that reason, legislative classification or discrimination based on race alone has often been held to be a denial of equal protection.”

In other words, the curfew orders mentioned race—they explicitly applied to people of Japanese ancestry. That’s what’s called a “racial classification.” That the curfew orders racially classified, Stone argued, made it problematic.

But that thinking defies logic. Stone should have traced the problematic nature of the curfew orders not to racial classification, but to the reduction of Japanese folk to a caste using racial classification.

Understand the difference?  

Stone confused the disease—the maintenance of caste—with the symptom, a racial classification. Like every other justice in American history up until that point, Stone misunderstood what marks America’s treatment of racial minorities as abhorrent.

People of color wince, not from classification, but from the boot pressing down on our throats. Those in internment camps cried out, not as victims of classification, but as victims of castework. The justices articulated the shallowest, least enlightened principle—the anti-classification principle—one that conveniently obscured their moral depravity as co-conspirators in persecution.

Stone’s endorsement of this anti-classification principle, however, became a part of American case law. Any judge could subsequently cite it to fortify a malignant interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Like that disturbingly moronic opinion penned by a Chief Justice.

Part IV

On December 18, 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, the Court deemed the Japanese exclusion orders constitutional. During that war against Japan, the Court ruled that the Equal Protection Clause allowed the federal government to intern people of Japanese descent.

Like in Hirabayashi, the Court in its majority Korematsu opinion produced language that caste preservationists would later glom on to.

“It should be noted,” Justice Hugo Black wrote for the six-to-three majority, “that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.”

Justice Black’s analysis falters because he failed to specify that a legal restriction that curtails the civil rights of just one racial group constitutes castework. The maintenance of caste, not the classification, poses the dilemma.

Please appreciate Hirabayashi and Korematsu as seminal equal protection cases. And in them, the Supreme Court neglected caste. The black robes overlooked what should animate the Constitution’s equality guarantee and instead endorsed the overly simplistic anti-classification principle.

Each Supreme Court decision, a block, builds on the previous. These blocks helped form the foundation. In Hirabayashi and Korematsu, the Supreme Court laid an unsound base.

We see the ramifications of that unsound base after Brown v. Board of Education. Once the nation outlawed segregation and passed strong civil rights laws, some institutions, starting in the mid-1960s, adopted race conscious policies to remedy centuries of anti-Black oppression. Variations of affirmative action basically.

Pre-Brown, caste preservationists scowled at the anti-classification principle. After all, the original decision that upheld separate but equal, Plessy v. Ferguson, would have went the other way had the Court followed the anti-classification principle.

At least I think it would—can never be too sure in America.

But with Plessy overturned, suddenly caste preservationists became anti-classification ambassadors. They appreciated that it could defeat programs, like affirmative action, meant to atone for the oppressive regime they had once supported.

They begged courts to evaluate racial remedial programs no different than courts had evaluated Jim Crow-era laws. Take Loving v. Viriginia for instance. In Loving, decided in 1967, the Court abolished laws that forbade interracial marriage. The justices relied upon the anti-classification principle in Loving and invoked both Hirabayashi and Korematsu as the inspiration for their legal reasoning.

Caste preservationists argued that, in the eyes of the Equal Protection Clause, anti-miscegenation statutes looked the same as affirmative action programs.

Why?

Because they both racially classified. And their argument used Hirabayashi and Korematsu.

As noted, the Supreme Court applied strict scrutiny in Korematsu. Yet, a Court majority, despite this racial classification, considered the reason for internment compelling enough to nonetheless find it constitutional.

This leads us to a crucial point.

Strict scrutiny does not kill everything it encounters. Policies implemented to remedy past racial oppression can survive if the Court evaluates that goal as compelling enough.

Caste preservationists, in response, devised a two-pronged plan. First, convince the Court to regard racial classification as necessarily triggering strict scrutiny analysis. In other words, any law or policy that mentions race must pass strict scrutiny. And second, convince the Court to treat remedying past racial oppression as an uncompelling justification.

This represented the doomsday scenario for caste abolitionists. They hoped to harness the same power—state power—that created the racial caste system to obliterate it.

I want to explore three cases with you. Through them, you can observe how these Japanese internment cases supplied legal reasoning that helped caste preservationists rework the Equal Protection Clause into a tool to maintain the racial caste system.

Part V 

On June 20, 1974, a White man, Allan Bakke, sued the University of California Davis Medical School. He argued that Davis’s race conscious special admissions program violated his equal protection rights.

For two consecutive years, Bakke endured rejection from every school to which he applied. A decade older than schools preferred. Higher numbers than some White students who received admission. Bakke, nonetheless, blamed affirmative action. Davis effectively set aside, for underrepresented racial minorities, sixteen percent of the spots for each year’s incoming class.

Davis developed this special admissions program for a few reasons, including wanting to redress America’s legacy of racial oppression and to educate doctors of color who would serve neglected minority communities. Similar motives encouraged many universities starting in the late ‘60s to launch such programs.

After his first rejection, Bakke wrote Davis’s admissions office: “I realize that the rationale for these quotas is that they attempt to atone for past racial discrimination. But instituting a new racial bias, in favor of minorities, is not a just solution.”

Here’s why you should roll your eyes.

When Bakke, born in 1940, graduated from segregated Coral Gables High School in South Florida, the American experiment, for three and a half centuries, had steeped Whiteness in advantage. Slavery, segregation, disenfranchisement—White Supremacy’s handmaidens—all operated as elements of a scheme to advance Allan Bakkes in every facet of their lives. Even in the decade prior to Bakke’s birth, the federal government, through the New Deal programs, enhanced the value of White skin.

The Social Security Act of 1935 guaranteed post-retirement income for millions. Social Security initially denied benefits to agricultural laborers and domestic servants, employment held largely by Black folk. Scores of Black maids and sharecroppers, bulldozed into a lifetime of menial low-income work, struggled to care for themselves in their final years. Instead of inheriting wealth, their offspring inherited poverty. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, empowered unions to collectively bargain. These unions, though, excluded Black folk, blocking them from good-paying jobs, health care, job security, and pensions. The Federal Housing Administration paved a lily-White road to homeownership. From 1934 to 1962, White folk received 98 percent of the more than $100 billion in federally backed home loans, racial reparations for no racial injury. The FHA deemed too risky the guaranteeing of homes in Black neighborhoods. During those same years, 350,000 homes were built with federal assistance in Northern California, where Bakke owned a home. Black folk received fewer than 100 of them.

During the depths of the Great Depression, America chartered rescue boats for White folk, while largely stranding Black Americans. The original race preference tree, planted in 1619 and nurtured ever since, bore fruit reserved for White mouths. And it sustained them, for centuries, nourishing millions of White families into the middle class.

In response to mid-century civil rights gains and policies meant to heal hundreds of years of wounds, White plaintiffs, on behalf of White people, sought to harness the Equal Protection Clause to lock in the White racial advantages that they had amassed since colonial America. If federal and state governments could not atone for governmental wrongdoing, White folk would continue earning interest on White Supremacy’s past investments in them.

On June 28, 1978, the Supreme Court decided Bakke’s case. The Court, hopelessly split, did not release a majority opinion. 

A five-justice majority concluded that Davis violated Bakke’s equal protection rights and ordered his enrollment. But a different five justice group ruled that colleges and universities could continue considering race in admissions decisions. Justice Lewis Powell was the swing vote, and thus court observers paid most attention to his opinion. 

Powell maintained that Davis’s special admissions program, because it racially classified, should be evaluated under the strict scrutiny test. He failed, however, to convince a majority to support this position.

“Racial and ethnic distinctions of any sort are inherently suspect,” he wrote, “and thus call for the most exacting judicial examination.” The Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases set this thinking in motion. The same thinking that led to that disturbingly moronic decision penned by a Chief Justice. 

“It is far too late,” Powell wrote, “to argue that the guarantee of equal protection to all persons permits the recognition of special wards entitled to a degree of protection greater than that accorded others.” Powell misunderstood that everyone receives the same level of protection when the government guarantees each individual’s right to freedom from caste.

Individuals from some groups will naturally experience more protection because some groups have suffered more attacks.

Powell did write that the goal of fostering a diverse educational environment justified the use of a racial classification in university admissions. But the cause of caste abolitionism demands much more—policymakers need the judiciary to allow for the implementation of race conscious laws for the specific reason of remedying racial oppression. Only that way can we cultivate an environment that breeds governmental action powerful enough to destroy the racial caste system. Powerful enough to demolish all castework. Powerful enough to defeat caste preservationism.

Justice Thurgood Marshall explained the issue with the outcome of the Bakke case well: “[I]t is more than a little ironic that, after several hundred years of class-based discrimination against Negroes, the Court is unwilling to hold that a class-based remedy for that discrimination is permissible. In declining to so hold, today’s judgment ignores the fact that for several hundred years Negroes have been discriminated against, not as individuals, but rather solely because of the color of their skins.”

Justice Marshall should have defended the constitutionality of Davis’s special admissions program by noting that it was not castework.

Marshall knew the difference personally.

He never applied to University of Maryland’s law school in the 1930s because the university did not admit Black people.

That was castework.

Most students at Davis, however, were White. Davis did not treat Bakke as a member of an inferior caste. Davis did not stamp White people with a badge of inferiority. And California did not treat White people like second-class citizens.

Nonetheless, the first Supreme Court affirmative action case produced language that caste preservationists needed to turn the Equal Protection Clause into a tool to further inequality. They did not get all they wanted. They did, though, move closer to their endgame.

Our next case zipped the caste preservationist mission forward by centering a false White victimhood.

Part VI

“I’m being discriminated against because of my color,” said Susan Lamm, a Jackson, Michigan, public school teacher. “I am continually laid off because I’m white.”

One of eight plaintiff teachers in the lawsuit Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, Lamm said this in November 1985, days ahead of Supreme Court oral argument.

Exclusionary faculty hiring practices and a long history of school segregation by custom, not law, defined Jackson’s public-school environment. Defined nearly all northern public-school environments in fact.

In 1969, the local NAACP branch filed a complaint with the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. The school district, the complaint alleged, administered segregated schools with minuscule Black faculty representation, instigating a wide range of troubles. The NAACP insisted that, resultingly, Black children received a poor education. Poorer than what White children received.

The district investigated and concluded that the NAACP spoke truth. In response, officials implemented various reforms, most notably the acquisition of more minority faculty.

These reforms, however, coincided with an economic downturn and a dwindling population, reducing the funding and need for teachers. Following the last-hired, first-fired paradigm, the district floundered at sustaining momentum in faculty diversification.

The teacher’s union and the school board agreed to a collective bargaining stipulation that specified layoffs could not reduce the percentage of minority faculty members. Therefore, the district laid off more senior White teachers and retained more junior Black teachers. Some White teachers sued. This layoff policy, they argued, violated their equal protection rights. Wendy Wygant, the lead plaintiff, said, “We stand to lose again and again.” 

On May 19, 1986, the Court announced its decision which went in the White teachers’ favor. However, a majority again failed to agree that strict scrutiny had to apply. That prize still eluded caste preservationists.

Justice Powell, the swing vote once more, wrote the main opinion. Again, he cited Hirabayashi in support of his thoughts, further establishing how inextricably linked Japanese internment is with the turning of the Equal Protection Clause into a caste preservationist tool.

And Powell reiterated his point from Bakke, that remedying longstanding racial oppression should be deemed an uncompelling justification for racial classification.

I argue in Their Accomplices Wore Robes that the Court decided Wygant incorrectly. The layoff policy was not castework and should have stood. A Court majority, however, held that the Jackson Board of Education lacked a compelling reason for why White teachers with more seniority should lose employment. The majority, of course, ignored the castework that created a world where White teachers would enjoy more seniority.

The Wygant decision stood for the principle that equal protection required limiting the negative ramifications affirmative action programs could inflict on what Powell termed “innocent parties.” The Jackson Board of Education openly stated its goal—create and maintain a diverse faculty to better teach children, particularly considering its own previous anti-Black hiring policies. And the Supreme Court struck a central part of the plan down because it hurt “innocent parties” as though Black children were not “innocent parties” of America’s—and Jackson’s—race legacy. The Court protected White racial advantages and deserted Black children.

Let me explain why you should reject Powell’s innocent parties notion.

We take our countries as they are. The good. The bad. We relish the virtues. We endure the pitfalls. For centuries, America, through White people operating as a collective, has purposefully advantaged Whiteness and handicapped Blackness. The betterment of both living White people and the White people yet conceived motivates this collective, producing a world where Black people experience fewer of the virtues and more of the pitfalls. The caste preservationist goal is to leave that imbalance alone. Let it remain. The proffered solutions, they swear, punish innocent White people. And that mustn’t stand for the same reason why it shouldn’t have stood when Black people were the target.

But the White collective’s racial domination pervaded so thoroughly, so successfully, for so long—and continues still—it long ago prevented the concept of innocence for We the People. For when you become part of We the People, by birth or by choice, solving the problem becomes your responsibility. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a caste-less society. And all have failed. No innocence can survive in a sea of sin. Innocence can only come after we drain that sea. When we abolish caste as the Constitution demands of us. No American, no matter the race, can claim innocence.

We are but individuals who are still wading in that sin, individuals who have yet to drain the sea. We the People can bask in innocence once we have. But not until then. Not until we have complied with the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, when the Court implicitly or explicitly regarded White plaintiffs as innocent victims of remedial policies, they misidentified them twice. None are innocent. And none can be a victim of an appropriate remedy to sin, a remedy that doesn’t reduce a people to a caste, that didn’t introduce new sin to the sea. 

Three years later, though, the Court handed caste preservationists exactly what they lusted after: A majority decision that, one, held that the Equal Protection Clause required all racial remedial programs to pass strict scrutiny, and two, that held that remedying past racial oppression was an uncompelling goal.

The decision, of course, built on that unsound base laid down in Hirabayashi and Korematsu. 

Fittingly, this case originated from the capitol of the Confederacy.

And don’t forget that decision that ends this video.

Part VII

Per data compiled in 1983, for the previous five years, Richmond, Virginia had awarded White-owned firms nearly 100 percent of the public money spent on construction projects, totaling approximately $124 million. The majority-Black city council, in a 50-percent-Black city, adopted a minority set-aside program. The plan required contractors who received a construction contract to outline how minority-owned firms would receive at least 30 percent of the contract value.

The J. A. Croson Company, a mechanical plumbing and heating contractor, won a bid to perform construction inside the city jail. The Croson Company, though, couldn’t locate a minority-owned subcontractor to fulfill 30 percent of the contract. The company then didn’t get the deal. And when Richmond rebid the contract, the company sued, arguing that the minority set-aside violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Fourth Circuit, applying strict scrutiny, agreed. Richmond appealed.

On January 23, 1989, the Supreme Court decided City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company.

Richmond public officials defended the set-aside as a benign policy enacted to help subjugated peoples and counteract discrimination within the local contracting industry. It was, in other words, a caste abolitionist policy.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor countered with some of the most ignorant legal analysis in the Court’s history. She defended strict scrutiny as the solution to the nonexistent problem of distinguishing between policies geared to ameliorate past injustice and those implemented to subjugate people.

Listen to her nonsense:

My next video will concern how what’s called the Intent Doctrine has also practically nullified the Equal Protection Clause. In it, I will further expose this “smoke out” language as dishonest. Make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell to get notified when that drops.

According to O’Connor’s illogic, judges would struggle to distinguish the purpose of this set-aside from, say, an anti-miscegenation law, without applying strict scrutiny. If she was honestly describing her and her colleagues’ abilities, if she really did not think she could be able to tell the difference between a segregation law and a minority set-aside, then she and her colleagues should have resigned. They were simply not smart enough to discharge their duties.

Caste preservationists wanted courts to evaluate racial remedial policies as courts once evaluated Jim Crow-era laws. And O’Connor produced a rationale to support the thinking. And she built it on the Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases to get there.

Marshall’s dissent blistered O’Connor’s opinion. “In concluding that remedial classifications warrant no different standard of review under the Constitution than the most brutal and repugnant forms of state-sponsored racism,” Marshall penned, “a majority of this Court signals that it regards racial discrimination as largely a phenomenon of the past, and that government bodies need no longer preoccupy themselves with rectifying racial injustice.”

Marshall should have contended that the set-aside did not treat White people as inferior. Did not degrade any White firm owner as a member of a lower caste. Was not castework. This anti-caste principle provides the cleanest way of distinguishing between illegitimate and benign racial classifications. 

Until the Fourth Circuit invalidated it, Richmond’s set-aside worked. Black folk received 30 percent of construction contracts under the set-aside. After it was struck down, Black folk returned to receiving less than one percent.

Caste preservationists lusted after a Supreme Court decision like Croson because they understood it would prove invaluable in frustrating Black progress.

Through an interpretation of equal protection that protected White racial advantages and maintained White economic supremacy, the Court kneecapped the state from subverting the racial caste system.

This led to that disturbingly moronic decision penned by a Chief Justice.

Part VIII

Seattle and Louisville Boards of Education pursued a race conscious desegregation plan to facilitate a goal of Brown v. Board of Education—children of all races attending school together. The cities’ plans worked similarly. Both considered race when determining a student’s school assignment.

Two White mothers, one in Seattle, one in Louisville, brought separate lawsuits against their respective education boards. These race conscious school assignment policies, the mothers argued, violated their children’s equal protection rights. The mothers resented bureaucrats sending their kids to undesirable schools. The Seattle mother, well-to-do, said, “it was terribly unfair” when her daughter received assignment to a “heavily black school with lower test scores” rather than the closer big fancy school.

Because the two cases involved the same legal issue, the Court decided them jointly. 

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the plurality opinion that held that by allowing race to inform school assignment, both school districts violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Roberts wrote, “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again….” 

Roberts compared these cases to Brown because they all involved racial classification.

According to Roberts’s logic, the plaintiff schoolchildren from Seattle and Louisville suffered the same injury as did the lead plaintiff in Brown, Linda Brown—their districts assigned them to a school based on race. One must concede that in each matter, the state considered race.

Yet, equating the injuries is absurd.

The Seattle and Louisville kids, on the one hand, experienced the disappointment of not attending their preferred school because their local representatives prized children attending school with kids from all walks of life. Linda Brown, on the other hand, suffered the weight of the state deeming her racially inferior and engraving that into her young psyche. 

If Brown turned merely on racial classification, Black and White students in Jim Crow states endured comparable harms. After all, Jim Crow statutes classified White as well as Black students. Imagine if a White boy in the 1950s sued. How would his lawyers relay his injury? That the board of education did not stack the deck enough in his favor? The idea that both races withstood comparable harms lampoons rational thought.

Calling Brown a case about racial classification misinterprets, embarrassingly, one of the simplest opinions in the Court’s history, an opinion written plainly to allow even the unlearned to follow. Yet, the nation’s leading jurist put his name on something that argued Brown centered not on the state purposefully disadvantaging Black people but rather the state merely racially classifying.

The five-to-four majority gifted caste preservationism a victory by adopting arguments that embezzled the work of caste abolitionism and funded the protection of White racial advantages.

White parents understand that one of the most salient racial advantages they can bequeath in a nation that supposedly prizes merit, high-quality K–12 educational opportunities, sets their children up for future success. In a nation that supposedly prizes merit, White children “earn” the right to attend schools that Black children have less access to absent race-conscious decision-making like that implemented in Seattle and Louisville. Public school educational quality intertwines with the wealth of the neighborhood in which it sits. White wealth, the sweet fruit of White Supremacy, dwarfs that of Black wealth, and that wealth opens educational opportunities. White Americans continue reaping what White Supremacy planted hundreds of years ago. And caste preservationists want to protect their right to continue dining on those apples and pears, while hiding, even sometimes from their own consciousness, the fruits’ origins. 

You must regard Roberts invoking the anti-classification principle to explain the injury that segregation leveled as substandard legal thinking. Even some of the NAACP counsel who argued Brown condemned Roberts for warping history.

Jack Greenberg, for instance, called Roberts’s opinion “preposterous.” “The plaintiffs in Brown were concerned with the marginalization and subjugation of black people,” Greenberg said. “They said you can’t consider race, but that’s how race was being used.” 

In other words, the NAACP attorneys arguing Brown were denouncing racial classifications used by the state to oppress a race. Oppression, not racial classification, elicited their fury. 

America has never suffered from a racial classification problem. Instead, a castework problem has always loomed over this land.

The Supreme Court has disappeared the latter, concentrated on the former, and exacerbated Black misery. And the Hirabayashi and Korematsu majority opinions helped form the legal foundation that has assisted in preserving America as a nation where King Caste reigns.

After the Civil War, America engraved the Constitution with new words that enshrined the right to equality. As four million formerly enslaved souls marched from hell into heaven, the Equal Protection Clause flickered as a twinkle of hope. America’s ability to remake itself—to evolve from a slave nation into a free one—hinged on creating a legal ecosystem that allowed freedom to breathe. And the Supreme Court has strangled it.

The situation may feel dire now, but caste abolitionism illuminates the path toward complete Black freedom. Freedom for all oppressed people actually. 

Please like, share, and subscribe. Drop a comment and give me your thoughts. Click here to watch the previous video in the series. And find a link to purchase Their Accomplices Wore Robes in the description and pinned comment.

Stay Brave.