Thomas, J., concurring
Civil Rights in the South 21 (2017) (explaining that while both Asians and blacks have at times fought “against similar forms of discrimination,” “[t]he issues of citizenship and immigrant status often defined Asian American battles for civil rights and separated them from African American legal battles”). Indeed, this Court even sanctioned this segregation—in the context of schools, no less. In Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U. S. 78, 81–82, 85–87 (1927), the Court held that a 9-year-old Chinese-American girl could be denied entry to a “white” school because she was “a member of the Mongolian or yellow race.”
Also, following the Japanese attack on the U. S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans in the American West were evacuated and interned in relocation camps. See Exec. Order No. 9066, 3 CFR 1092 (1943). Over 120,000 were removed to camps beginning in 1942, and the last camp that held Japanese Americans did not close until 1948. National Park Service, Japanese American Life During Internment, www.nps.gov/articles/japanese-american-internment-archeology.htm. In the interim, this Court endorsed the practice. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944).
Given the history of discrimination against Asian Americans, especially their history with segregated schools, it seems particularly incongruous to suggest that a past history of segregationist policies toward blacks should be remedied at the expense of Asian American college applicants.[1] But this problem is not limited to Asian Americans; more
- ↑ Even beyond Asian Americans, it is abundantly clear that the university respondents’ racial categories are vastly oversimplistic, as the opinion of the Court and Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence make clear. See ante, at 24–25; post, at 5–7 (opinion of Gorsuch, J.). Their “affirmative action” programs do not help Jewish, Irish, Polish, or other “white” ethnic groups whose ancestors faced discrimination upon arrival in America, any more than they help the descendants of those Japanese-American citizens interned during World War II.
