Those who knew Justice Clarence Thomas during his formative years at College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School have long noted the sharp ideological turn he took over the course of his life: from admiring Malcolm X and protesting racism alongside his Black classmates to deeply resenting the affirmative action policies that afforded him his success.
That switch may have occurred most pointedly during his time at Yale, when, in Thomas’s own recollection, a white admissions officer told him and a group of Black students that none of them was qualified to be there.
By the time Thomas had experienced rounds of law firm rejections – despite attending one of America’s top law schools – he didn’t blame the ever-persistent racism of white employers in the early 1970s, or even seem to consider that he was outshined academically when compared to his Black peers. Instead, he adopted the belief that job recruiters, like his Yale admissions officer, associated him with “undeserving” Black law school admits. Thomas came to view corrective policies like affirmative action as a zero-sum game in which the merits of Black students and the considerations of historical harms against Black people could not coexist. He wholly ingested the racist take of the admissions officer in his ascendency to the supreme court, and that take steers his judicial opinions to this day.
Thursday’s supreme court decision to strike down affirmative action policies in college admissions will be Thomas’s lone legacy in a judiciary in which he has been otherwise taciturn. His decades-long rejection of the idea that his success is tied to race-conscious policies is core to his self-image. In Thomas’s estimation, he has singularly overcome racism with grit and perseverance, and any considerations of structural racism in education and employment run counter to the idea that Black people belong in those spaces.
That narrative is in direct contention with the spirit of affirmative action, which considers the uneven starting line that sets Black Americans in particular back as a group. But that narrative is also the one that will proliferate most in the post-affirmative action college essay – because while the court banned affirmative action programs, it did not entirely forbid schools from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected their life. Now, the court’s ruling shifts the burden of “proving” the effects of racism to the college essay. As a result, Black students will increasingly try to set themselves apart in admissions by telling triumphant stories of individualism, bootstrapping and resilience in the face of racial hardships.
Some schools of research have shown that these triumphant stories are the exact narratives of Black life that white colleges reward. In a 2019 study, the sociologist Ted Thornhill surveyed 500 American admissions counselors (an occupation that is 75% white nationally) to show how they judge the stories Black prospective students tell in their essays. Thornhill found that applicants who discussed organized Black resistance to white racial domination, for instance, were penalized in score. But it wasn’t activism itself that turned off admissions officers; the study included Black applicants who were environmental activists and found that they ranked highly.
What admissions officers sought to avoid, according to Thornhill, were Black students who would “rock the boat” with antiracist activism and whose essays discussed structural racism both in their lives and on college campuses. Of the college essays he surveyed, the ones that were considered top applicants and potential admits to predominantly white institutions were ones that closely resembled Thomas’s depiction of himself.
I talked to Aya Waller-Bey, a sociology PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, who studies the role of race and racial narratives in college essays. In her dissertation research, she found that not only are Black applicants rewarded when they disclose trauma and vulnerability in their essays, but they’re also viewed favorably when they appear as “someone who can not only endure hardship but overcome”. This approach is reminiscent of Thomas’s insistence that he triumphed over the poverty of his sharecropping youth on his own and never benefited from any race-conscious program. Such essays, Waller-Bey told me, “put Blackness into a frame of what white universities think Black experiences should be, and penalize students who discuss Blackness in positive ways or discuss racism as an act of white political and economic power”.
In the aftermath of affirmative action’s ban, white students, contrastingly, will continue to write self-exploration essays that do not ask them to frame their success within a confined view of whiteness. They will not feel pressured to describe the leg-ups they have received from generational wealth (the median white household in the US has nearly 10 times the wealth of the median Black family). They will not be penalized for attending all-white K-12 schools or for being raised in segregated neighborhoods. And none of their unearned advantages will be framed as a knock on their academic merits or as privileges they should account for in assessing their academic success. Another racial divide – this one tied to the imbalanced labor of establishing worthiness – will no doubt emerge.
As a set of legal statutes and governmental policies, affirmative action policies in college admissions intended to account for historical wrongdoings against entire groups of marginalized people – expressly Black Americans. They aimed to address Jim Crow, lynching, white terroristic violence, redlining, segregation in housing and schooling, and exclusionary government assistance policies like the GI bill, the greatest expansion of the middle class in US history that benefitted white people almost exclusively.
But as of Thursday, those policies are effectively barred on a systemic scale. To fill the gap that the ban will inevitably leave, Black students will have to make individual cases as to why their own resilience over racial hardships makes them worthy of consideration. They will rely on Thomas’s brand of exceptionalism and individualism, further undermining the intention and legacy of one of the few successful efforts at racial redress in this country.
Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man.