Josh Hammer writes at Newsweek about the potential impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear two cases dealing with race and university admissions, including one tied to UNC.

The cases will be jointly argued during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the Court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies. As presented to the Court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should…hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”

The Court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling, pan-institutional “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism. Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity. Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the Court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this Court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor. …

… The more interesting twist came after news broke of the impending retirement: President Joe Biden affirmed that he intends to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to nominate a black woman—not a black man, not a Hispanic woman, but specifically a black woman—to replace the retiring Jewish male justice.

There is only one way to describe crass identity politics operationalized at this high a political level: Evil.