Page:Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.pdf/61

Rh rights not just against the Federal Government but also the government of the citizen’s State of residence. Unlike the Civil Rights Act, however, the Amendment employed a wholly race-neutral text, extending privileges or immunities to all “citizens”—even if its practical effect was to provide all citizens with the same privileges then enjoyed by whites. That citizenship guarantee was often linked with the concept of equality. Vaello Madero, 596 U. S., at ___ (, concurring) (slip op., at 10). Combining the citizenship guarantee with the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Equal Protection Clause, the Fourteenth Amendment ensures protection for all equal citizens of the Nation without regard to race. Put succinctly, “[o]ur Constitution is color-blind.” Plessy, 163 U. S., at 559 (Harlan, J., dissenting).

In the period closely following the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, Congress passed several statutes designed to enforce its terms, eliminating government-based Black Codes—systems of government-imposed segregation—and criminalizing racially motivated violence. The marquee legislation was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ch. 114, 18 Stat. 335–337, and the justifications offered by proponents of that measure are further evidence for the colorblind view of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Civil Rights Act of 1875 sought to counteract the systems of racial segregation that had arisen in the wake of the Reconstruction era. Advocates of so-called separate-but-equal systems, which allowed segregated facilities for blacks and whites, had argued that laws permitting or requiring such segregation treated members of both races precisely alike: Blacks could not attend a white school, but symmetrically, whites could not attend a black school. See Plessy, 163 U. S., at 544 (arguing that, in light of the social