Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/192

Rh their personal statements or essays. See Harvard I, 397 F. Supp. 3d, at 137. Students often do so. See, e.g., 2 App. in No. 20–1199, at 906–907 (student respondent discussing her Latina identity on her application); id., at 949 (student respondent testifying he “wrote about [his] Vietnamese identity on [his] application”). Notwithstanding this Court’s confusion about racial self-identification, neither students nor universities are confused. There is no evidence that the racial categories that respondents use are unworkable.

Cherry-picking language from Grutter, the Court also holds that Harvard’s and UNC’s race-conscious programs are unconstitutional because they do not have a specific expiration date. This new durational requirement is also not grounded in law, facts, or common sense. Grutter simply announced a general “expect[ation]” that “the use of racial preferences [would] no longer be necessary” in the future. 539 U. S., at 343. As even SFFA acknowledges, those remarks were nothing but aspirational statements by the Grutter Court. Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 21–707, p. 56.

Yet this Court suggests that everyone, including the Court itself, has been misreading Grutter for 20 years.