Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/218

10 middle-class America” (by giving $95 billion to veterans and their families between 1944 and 1971) was “deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.” So, too, will I bypass how Blackblack [sic] people were prevented from partaking in the consumer credit market—a market that helped Whitewhite [sic] people who could access it build and protect wealth. Nor will time and space permit my elaborating how local officials’ racial hostility meant that even those benefits that Blackblack [sic] people could formally obtain were unequally distributed along racial lines. And I could not possibly discuss every way in which, in light of this history, facially race-blind policies still work race-based harms today (e.g., racially disparate tax-system treatment; the disproportionate location of toxic-waste facilities in Blackblack [sic] communities; or the deliberate action of governments at all levels in designing interstate highways to bisect and segregate Blackblack [sic] urban communities).

The point is this: Given our history, the origin of persistent race-linked gaps should be no mystery. It has never been a deficiency of Blackblack [sic] Americans’ desire or ability to, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “stand on [their] own legs.” Rather, it was always simply what Justice Harlan recognized 140 years ago—the persistent and pernicious denial of “what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race.” Civil Rights Cases, 109 U. S., at 61 (dissenting opinion).