This morning, the SCOTUS did what everyone expected it to do: it put a stake through the heart of affirmative action. Race can no longer be a factor in deciding public or private college admissions. The supposed intention: a level playing field. Strange… a level playing field was the whole POINT of affirmative action. Affirmative action was the remedy for a playing field that never was level – ever.

Affirmative action is an odd duck of a cause because of who supports it and who wants it gone. According to polling (and polling on all topics – especially race – is dubious because we never get to see the actual polling questions), Americans prefer that affirmative action continue by 53% to 47%. However, Americans also think (70% to 30%) that colleges and universities should not consider race as part of their admissions.

That’s a massive contradiction!

The loudest voices against affirmative action have always been white. But then, white racism has always stood in America’s way. America is a brilliant idea poorly executed. Our founders, flush with French enlightenment thinking, penned “All men are created equal”. But they didn’t mean it.

Well, they meant the “men” part. Men were created equal and women were not.

As for the “all men” part – our founders meant men like them: white, Christian land owners. You can’t really claim “all men are equal” while enslaving some of them.

Slavery’s bottom line – the whole reason you’d enslave someone else to begin with – is to steal their work product. Free labor. That’s the point. The labor’s not entirely free of course. One must feed, clothe and house one’s slaves or they’ll die. So – minus those “slavery business” costs – the point of the exercise is to get other people to work for free.

Aside from the Vikings (who landed in what’s now Canada, spent a few seasons there then gave up on the project), Europeans always saw the Americas as a commercial opportunity above all. They never landed aspiring to commune with other peoples. Rather, Europeans landed intent on exploiting them. Or taking their land and natural resources. Gold especially.

Europeans got it in their heads that Native American cultures all succumbed to Europe’s superior culture. Bullshit! European pathogens decimated Native populations. When Europeans began arriving en masse, they stepped onto a de-populated continent unable to defend itself. From the start, white Europeans told themselves that the Americas were theirs because God wanted them to have it.

That is the root of American racism.

Europeans found exactly what they wanted here – commerce and lots of it. They found abundant natural resources here and cash crops that the whole world wanted: tobacco, sugar cane and cotton. The problem was that producing so much tobacco, sugar cane and cotton would require a massive amount of labor.

From the owner’s point of view, every penny spent on workers is a penny less profit. Hey, what if you could get all that labor for nothing (minus those costs of doing business mentioned earlier)? From the South’s perspective, it wasn’t a question. They went for the free labor and then twisted everyone else’s arm to justify it and make slavery part of America.

Imagine if, instead, the South hadn’t had slavery available to it… what if the South had paid fair market rates for its farm labor. Instead of being a racist abomination, the Confederacy could have become the world’s first worker’s state.

Slavery destroys people in myriad ways.

For starters, it robs the slave of their immediate pay. That’s after they’ve been robbed of all previous pay. Without pay, one cannot build wealth. Without wealth, one has to rely on one’s immediate pay just to survive. Slavery had an economic impact on slaves and their decendants like nothing else.

White racism made it impossible for every non-white race to live the American ideal of freedom. Asians have experienced profound racism in America. Latinos of every kind have experienced racism. Pacific Islanders and Jews have felt racism’s touch.

Jews occupy a strange space here. In Europe, historically, Jews were excluded from European culture and from European ideas of whiteness. Here in America, Jews can pass as white so long as our Jewishness isn’t an issue. Alas, in America today, our Jewishness is an issue. White people believe they can seize our privileges at their whim.

I think of Jews as “white adjacent”.

While every other non-white group has had it very hard here, no other group was enslaved as a group! White America has treated every other group miserably, paying them poorly (and sometimes cheating them of their pay). But at least “pay” was on the table.

Historically, as all the other groups got paid, they either sent money “home” or squirreled it away. Building wealth was never easy, but it wasn’t made impossible.

The Civil War may have ended formal slavery but white racism found ways to keep it going on the down low. Had Reconstruction succeeded, it would have leveled the playing field considerably. Alas, Andrew Johnson killed Reconstruction dead.

America stands at a pivot point because white racism is making its Hail Mary power grab. About a third of America has never actually been down with democracy. They’ve feared democracy because one can’t control the outcome of free and fair elections. Non-white people could win!

That’s why conservatives and Republicans work so hard to prevent non-white people (or white people sympathetic to non-whites) from voting. They don’t want the playing field to level.

Then they might have to compete.

It wasn’t good enough to simply make it hard for Black people to gain wealth. White racism made it impossible for Black people to hold onto any wealth they did acquire! Take the terrible story of Black Wall Street. Black Wall Street was a thriving middle class world filled with happy, successful people. White racism destroyed it and many like it.

White racism has done the same thing to thriving Asian communities. Thriving Latino communities, too.

But no other group has endured what Black Americans have endured. Of course white racism divides in order to conquer. That’s why – when polled – every community but the Black community opposes continuing Affirmative Action.

But, again, that’s more complicated than it looks! And we still don’t know what the poll was really measuring because we can’t see the actual questions. We have to trust the pollsters; that’s hard because the pollsters won’t show us their proprietary questions.

The majority of Americans are very fair people. They want for everyone else what they want for themselves. The rising tide floating all boats.

Or even just a truly level playing field.

America’s playing field has never been level. Affirmative Action acknowledged a core truth about America and successfully remedied it. Today, the SCOTUS undid the remedy and drove home that terrible, core truth.