On Thursday, June 29th, the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action on the basis of race to be unconstitutional.The exact proscriptions of the ruling are narrow, applying mainly to the practice of curving standardized test scores, but the true consequence of SFFA v. Harvard is that it provides favorable terrain for the anti-affirmative action movement to continue its assault on the higher education reforms that came out of the civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century.

If its opponents succeed in removing the principle of affirmative action from college admissions entirely, the ramifications will be severe. Decades after Brown v. Board and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, research suggests that K-12 schools are still effectively segregated and Black households are separated from white ones by a truly staggering wealth gap. With Black youth chronically underserved by a collapsing public education system, and with the historically unprecedented cost of a college degree looming over systemically impoverished Black families, the disappearance of race-conscious admissions practices and financial aid will revert colleges and universities back to their near-exlusively-white status from the Jim Crow era.

Where do we go from here? To adequately answer that question, we must first understand how we got here.

The enormous divide in education opportunities and material wealth between racial groups in this country is no accident of history. America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, who were never compensated for their own unpaid labor or that of their many deceased ancestors when they finally won their freedom. The vast majority were prohibited from learning to read. In their first years as free men and women, the Black protagonists of Reconstruction made universal public education one of their core demands, alongside a general redistribution of the lands they had labored on for generations as slaves. Northern capitalists, fearing what the expropriation of Southern plantation-owners’ property would mean for their own fortunes, betrayed the antislavery revolution and condemned Reconstruction to defeat, paving the way for the re-subjugation of the free Black masses under a regime of racial segregation. The legal basis for segregation was battered down by the civil rights movement over the course of the twentieth century, but it persists today in less overt forms.

Universal, integrated, and comprehensive education was once again a core demand of the Black freedom struggle during the mass mobilizations of the 1950s and 60s, leading to famous flashpoints like the integration of Little Rock Central High School or the standoff at the University of Alabama. It was during this time that the term “affirmative action” was first applied to programs intended to ensure racial diversity, first in government contract work, then gradually in universities.

Early affirmative action programs were met with backlash from Southern conservatives, but today’s anti-affirmative action movement is rhetorically dissimilar to the backlash of the early 1960s. Neither in talk show soundbites nor in Supreme Court briefs do today’s reactionaries explicitly defend racial exclusion as a property right, even if the implication is there. Instead, they take up the cause of meritocracy: affirmative action is bad because it gives the disadvantaged (if they admit any disadvantage) a leg up at the expense of the best of the best, or so the argument goes.

This new line of thought is best understood as a reaction to the revolutionary youth movements that shook the U.S. in the late 1960s. All over the country, multiracial student organizations flooded college campuses with radical ideas. We had one of our own here at Furman—the local chapter of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, which held anti-war and anti-police violence protests and fought for the right of communists to come to Furman as guest speakers. Joseph Vaughn was a founding member, something the university seems to have forgotten. Elsewhere, student organizing took on an even more militant quality. At Columbia and Cornell in 1968 and 1969, respectively, students organized physical occupations of school property to protest their universities’ complicity in on-campus racial hatred, the destruction of local Black neighborhoods, and racist terror abroad via the military-industrial complex. In the years since these upheavals, conservatives have denounced them with a mixture of law-and-order panic and feigned meritocratic concern. The commentator Thomas Sowell laid out the argument clearly when he wrote the following:

“The Cornell tragedy began with one of those good intentions with which the road to Hell is paved. [The administration] sought to increase minority student enrollment—and to do so by admitting students who would not meet the existing academic standards at Cornell. The emphasis was on getting militant ghetto kids, some of whom turned out to be hoodlums.”

With campus activism no longer taking on menacingly revolutionary proportions like it did in the 1960s, the second part of this line of thought—that affirmative action sows the seeds for the revolt of the marginalized in a setting where the nation-sized country club we call white civil society is meant to be manufactured—has faded into the background, though with the recent growth of organizations like the Young Democratic Socialists of America, that may soon change. But in the meantime, the movement has completed its long march to the Supreme Court under the banner of meritocracy, with high-scoring Asian-American students as its poster children rather than the wealthy whites who will in fact be the primary beneficiaries of the end of affirmative action.

What comes next for those of us on the other side of the line?

First, we must recognize that no progress has ever been attained or defended except through mass struggle. Racial equity in higher education will not be won in a courtroom, in the halls of Congress, or in the Oval Office. It will be won in the streets, on picket lines, and on campus grounds filled with throngs of people organized for a common purpose.

Second, we must see affirmative action for what it is and strive to go beyond its limitations. Race-conscious admissions, though they must be defended at all costs from efforts to reimpose segregation by another name, are still a step backwards from the demands raised by the Black freedom struggle since Emancipation: the universal right to a comprehensive education and the destruction of white supremacy at its roots. Outside of this revolutionary context, affirmative action exemplifies an uninspired liberal approach to racial equity whereby the racially oppressed climb the social ladder into the middle income bracket to improve their standing in capitalist society rather than organizing for a mass redistribution of wealth, property, and political power that would challenge that society’s foundations.

Third, we must be conscious of the fact that this issue is a flashpoint in the wider struggle for a multiracial democracy. The Supreme Court is unelected, yet effectively holds the power to rule by decree on issues from affirmative action to abortion. Of the six justices who signed onto the majority opinion in SFFA v. Harvard, five were appointed by presidents who were elected without winning the popular vote. All justices are approved by the Senate, which gives voters in small states like Wyoming (roughly 90% white) up to seventy times more voting power than those in large states like California (roughly 65% non-white). All this is thanks to our Constitution, which was written by slaveowners, for slaveowners and continues to reflect those interests centuries later. We will need to tear down this old political order to pave the way for racial justice.

Fourth, and most importantly, we must understand that we, as students, hold the power to bring about the world we hope, need, and deserve to live in, and that we have the responsibility to use that power. We should look to the example of the students at Columbia and Cornell half a century ago, whose anti-racist struggles forced their administrations to concede disciplinary reforms, new race-conscious curricula, and the creation of elected assemblies of students with input in their schools’ budgets. They put everything on the line to fight for racial justice and democracy, and though the fight is far from over, they won concrete and lasting victories. We should all dare to be so bold.