Kinfolkology offers up our archive and its data as instruments of justice and redress.

This is both an ethical and strategic necessity.

In June of 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that race can no longer be a factor influencing admissions to institutions of higher learning. While this decision specifically addressed affirmative action, it will have significant implications for all types of remedial programs, including reparations.

Why?

While race-conscious admission programs were originally intended to address past historical injustices—specifically the systematic exclusion of African Americans and other non-white individuals from institutions of higher learning—the Supreme Court rejected this justification in a 1978 case called Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. In fact, in Bakke, the Court ruled that historical injustices were not only insufficient justification for race-conscious admissions but that they were “irrelevant” to the issue entirely, since in the Court’s view, reserving a number of admissions for students of a particular race (a practice known as a “racial quota system”) would be "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." (The injustice of this statement, of course, is that there has never been a time in which the histories of racial injustice in the United States have been “irrelevant” to the make-up of its institutions.)

In effect, even though the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke that colleges and universities could use “affirmative action” to increase the number of non-white students at their institutions, the Court justified this decision by finding that the government had a “compelling interest” in ensuring diversity in institutions of higher learning. This is the finding reversed by the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision. According to today’s Court, diversity is not a compelling interest on which race-conscious admissions can stand. Bakke was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and now it has revealed itself.

Bakke put race-conscious programs on the shakiest of grounds, and now that ground has collapsed.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision will cause a staggering drop in the number of non-white students at elite institutions of higher learning, reversing decades of hard-won progress. But the path forward is clear: We must demand justice for the sweeping history of racial injustice in this country.

Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the “diversity interest,” this is, in fact, our only option; from now on, race-conscious initiatives—including any type of program administering reparations—must be “narrowly tailored” to address and remedy the current effects of specific past racial injustices.

And what are slavery’s archives—and their data—if not catalogues of specific historical injustices?

Now is the time to say what we know to be true.

An accounting is due in this country. Justice is owed.