How Justice Clarence Thomas led SCOTUS to kill DEI

Supreme Court unanimously rejects special standards for majority-group discrimination claims, reflecting Thomas's view that American law protects individual rather than group rights

Scott Douglas Gerber is the author of, among other books, "First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas." He is currently completing a legal thriller entitled "The Trafficker: A Novel."

Justice Thomas has reiterated that American law protects individual rather than groups rights throughout his three-and-a-half decades on the nation’s highest court. In 1995's Missouri v. Jenkins, for instance, Thomas became the first Supreme Court justice to directly criticize Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Although he called state-mandated segregation "despicable," he said that the Court was wrong in 1954 to rely on disputable social science evidence to declare segregation unconstitutional rather than invoking the "constitutional principle" that "the government must treat citizens as individuals, and not as members of racial, ethnic or religious groups."

Justice Thomas has made similar pronouncements in many other judicial opinions. His concurring opinion in 2007's Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 is perhaps the strongest articulation of his conception of equality: "The dissent attempts to marginalize the notion of a colorblind Constitution by consigning it to me and Members of today’s plurality. … But I am quite comfortable in the company I keep. My view of the Constitution is Justice Harlan’s view in Plessy: ‘Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.’" More recently, Justice Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions holding that colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions decisions that "While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."