Sotomayor, J., dissenting
their personal statements or essays. See Harvard I, 397 F. Supp. 3d, at 137. Students often do so. See, e.g., 2 App. in No. 20–1199, at 906–907 (student respondent discussing her Latina identity on her application); id., at 949 (student respondent testifying he “wrote about [his] Vietnamese identity on [his] application”). Notwithstanding this Court’s confusion about racial self-identification, neither students nor universities are confused. There is no evidence that the racial categories that respondents use are unworkable.[1]
4
Cherry-picking language from Grutter, the Court also holds that Harvard’s and UNC’s race-conscious programs are unconstitutional because they do not have a specific expiration date. Ante, at 30–34. This new durational requirement is also not grounded in law, facts, or common sense. Grutter simply announced a general “expect[ation]” that “the use of racial preferences [would] no longer be necessary” in the future. 539 U. S., at 343. As even SFFA acknowledges, those remarks were nothing but aspirational statements by the Grutter Court. Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 21–707, p. 56.
Yet this Court suggests that everyone, including the Court itself, has been misreading Grutter for 20 years.
- ↑ The Court suggests that the term “Asian American” was developed by respondents because they are “uninterested” in whether Asian American students “are adequately represented.” Ante, at 25; see also ante, at 5 (Gorsuch, J., concurring) (suggesting that “[b]ureaucrats” devised a system that grouped all Asian Americans into a single racial category). That argument offends the history of that term. “The term ‘Asian American’ was coined in the late 1960s by Asian American activists—mostly college students—to unify Asian ethnic groups that shared common experiences of race-based violence and discrimination and to advocate for civil rights and visibility.” Brief for Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund et al. as Amici Curiae 9 (AALDEF Brief).
