Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch ripped the race-identification part of college applications, calling it a "scheme of classifications" that was devised by "bureaucrats."
In an opinion concurring with Chief Justice John Roberts that race-conscious student admissions programs are unconstitutional, Gorsuch said that the race-identification boxes that prospective students are asked to tick on college applications were created by the government to collect data.
"A federal interagency commission devised this scheme of classifications in the 1970s to facilitate data collection," Gorsuch wrote, adding that the commission acted "without any input from anthropologists, sociologists, ethnologists, or other experts."
"Recognizing the limitations of their work, federal regulators cautioned that their classifications 'should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature, nor should they be viewed as determinants of eligibility for participation in any Federal program,' " he said.
Despite the regulators' warning, "others eventually used this classification system for that very purpose — to 'sor[t] out winners and losers in a process that, by the end of the century, would grant preference[s] in jobs … and university admissions,' " Gorsuch wrote.
The justice also questioned why the "White" classification includes anyone from "Europe, Asia west of India, and North Africa," noting that the category "includes those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or Iranian descent."
"It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member of the British royal family," Gorsuch said.
"Meanwhile, 'Black or African American' covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a typical American suburb," he added.
Gorsuch also said that such attempts to sort Americans into "a handful" of racial classification groups have become "more incoherent with time," as American families become increasingly multiracial.
The Supreme Court ruled to strike down affirmative action on Thursday, with the court's conservative majority finding the use of race in college admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) unconstitutional and discriminatory.
Gorsuch criticized Harvard and UNC for their treatment of applicants' racial identities in his concurring opinion.
"Just as there is no question Harvard and UNC consider race in their admissions processes, there is no question both schools intentionally treat some applicants worse than others because of their race," he wrote.
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