Plessy’s majority opinion used racist ideas to justify an already-discriminatory policy

Evidence

In his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown relied on racist ideas to support a policy that was clearly discriminatory in intent. It was his job to obscure those intentions. Justice Brown evaded the politics of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, evaded the discriminatory intent, and evaded the obvious shoddiness of the railcars for Blacks, and instead semantically classed it a “social law” that merely recognized the social “distinction” between the races. “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane,” wrote the former Detroit corporate lawyer. The lone dissenting voice to the Plessy ruling was hardly an antiracist voice. Though he did not doubt that Whites would forever be “the dominant race in this country,” Justice John Harlan of Kentucky wrote, “in the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 736

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: Harlan’s ‘color-blind Constitution’ dissent — the most quoted antiracist line in American legal history — was uttered by a man who fully believed in White supremacy. What does it mean that the landmark color-blind principle came from a segregationist conviction?
• XREF: The color-blind Constitution quote is the genealogy of the Roberts Court color-blindness doctrine — connects to modern affirmative action rulings.