Equality in the US has been a fraught proposition all along

Even affirmative action has not fulfilled the US pledge of freedom

- FRANCIS WILKINSON

Just in time for 4 July, the US Supreme Court curtailed the ability of universities to use race as a factor in admissions. Many US universities have used affirmative action not only as a means for student diversity, but in a general effort to bolster equality in a stubbornly unequal America. The court’s Republican majority decided that such quotas violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The court ruled, in effect, that more equal is less fair.

Equality has always been a fraught concept. In the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had the temerity to declare that “all men are created equal," which the slave owner from Virginia neither believed nor pretended to, at least not beyond rhetoric. Stanford historian Jack Rakove holds that Jefferson meant colonists “as a people" had a right to self-government that was equal to the right of other peoples. But given the scarcity of self-government in 1776, even that’s a curiously expansive framework. In the run-up to that revolt, ‘equality’, however hedged, was a useful rallying cry for Americans seeking to jettison a king, who ruled over them from divinely inspired heights, and his troops, who exercised proximate controls. A decade later, with freedom won and British Raj tossed, the statement’s utility seemed to have expired; it found no purchase in the slavery-drenched US Constitution.