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16 The Court thus made clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equality guarantee applied to members of all races, including Asian Americans, ensuring all citizens equal treatment under law.

Seven years later, the Court relied on the Slaughter-House view to conclude that “[t]he words of the [Fourteenth A]mendment … contain a necessary implication of a positive immunity, or right, most valuable to the colored race,—the right to exemption from unfriendly legislation against them distinctively as colored.” Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 307–308 (1880). The Court thus found that the Fourteenth Amendment banned “expres[s]” racial classifications, no matter the race affected, because these classifications are “a stimulant to … race prejudice.” Id., at 308. See also. Similar statements appeared in other cases decided around that time. See Virginia v. Rives, 100 U. S. 313, 318 (1880) (“The plain object of these statutes [enacted to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment], as of the Constitution which authorized them, was to place the colored race, in respect of civil rights, upon a level with whites. They made the rights and responsibilities, civil and criminal, of the two races exactly the same”); Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339, 344–345 (1880) (“One great purpose of [the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments] was to raise the colored race from that condition of inferiority and servitude in which most of them had previously stood, into perfect equality of civil rights with all other persons within the jurisdiction of the States”).

This Court’s view of the Fourteenth Amendment reached its nadir in Plessy, infamously concluding that the Fourteenth Amendment “could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” 163 U. S., at 544. That holding stood in sharp contrast to the Court’s earlier embrace of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equality