The Brouhaha about Affirmative Action

The recent US Supreme Court's ruling stating the student acceptance policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which factored in race, gender, and economic status, were unconstitutional; a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law will have huge impacts on not only college acceptance and enrollment but on the psyche of this nation.

- Junious Ricardo Stanton

That Supreme Court's ruling is preposterous, and to use the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as the rationale is an egregious injustice within itself! The Fourteen Amendment, like the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, was written and ratified following The War Between The States (incorrectly called The US Civil War) in the late 1860s.

(Note: a civil war, by definition, is when two or more parties/groups engage in hostile and violent activities against each other or the government in an attempt to take over, usurp or abolish the existing government. That is not what happened in the US! The Confederate States seceded from the Union, galvanized themselves, and formed their own separate government with their own governing body, their own currency, commerce, and international relationships.) South Carolina demanded the Union evacuate and surrender Fort Sumter, which was located on Charleston Harbor. Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender the Fort and sent supplies to reinforce the post. As a result, hostilities broke out, starting the war between the Union and Confederacy.

Following the war, a "reunited nation" was forced to address and figure out what to do with its enslaved population. (Note Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free any enslaved people, not one, not any in the Confederacy and none in the Union states that still enslaved Blacks!) The so-called "Radical Republicans worked to resolve the status of enslaved people in this country, to clarify and define their legal standing and status. With little dissent, because their former Southern colleagues were no longer in office or power, the Republicans were able to rally support to draft, pass, and ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.