Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/222

14 to at least 50,000 excess deaths a year for Blackblack [sic] Americans vis-à-vis Whitewhite [sic] Americans. That is 80 million excess years of life lost from just 1999 through 2020.

Amici tell us that “race-linked health inequities pervad[e] nearly every index of human health” resulting “in an overall reduced life expectancy for racial and ethnic minorities that cannot be explained by genetics.” Meanwhile—tying health and wealth together—while she lays dying, the typical Blackblack [sic] American “pay[s] more for medical care and incur[s] more medical debt.”

We return to John and James now, with history in hand. It is hardly John’s fault that he is the seventh generation to graduate from UNC. UNC should permit him to honor that legacy. Neither, however, was it James’s (or his family’s) fault that he would be the first. And UNC ought to be able to consider why.

Most likely, seven generations ago, when John’s family was building its knowledge base and wealth potential on the university’s campus, James’s family was enslaved and laboring in North Carolina’s fields. Six generations ago, the North Carolina “Redeemers” aimed to nullify the results of the Civil War through terror and violence, marauding in hopes of excluding all who looked like James from equal citizenship. Five generations ago, the North Carolina Red Shirts finished the job. Four (and three) generations ago, Jim Crow was so entrenched in the State of North Carolina