Supreme Court Rules 1964 Civil Rights Act Also Protects Whites

After only 61 years, the Supreme Court unanimously declares that whites, men, and straights have civil rights, too.

One of the craziest things about America since the 1960s is that until today, nobody knew for sure if whites, men, and heterosexuals enjoyed equal rights under civil rights law or not. Federal appeals courts had ruled differently on the question. Thus, in five-twelfths of the country, whites, men, and heterosexuals were — until this morning — official legal Untermenschen when it came to the right to sue over discrimination.

From the New York Times news section:

Supreme Court Rules for Straight Woman in Job Discrimination Suit

The justices rejected an appeals court’s requirement that members of majority groups meet a heightened standard to win employment discrimination cases.

By Adam Liptak

June 5, 2025

The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously ruled in favor of a straight woman who twice lost positions to gay workers, saying an appeals court had been wrong to require her to meet a heightened burden in seeking to prove workplace discrimination because she was a member of a majority group.

The actual lawsuit is a run-of-the-mill tedious office politics discrimination case with the usual sample sizes too small to allow an outsider to get a clear perspective on the merits of the case: a straight woman sued because homosexuals were twice promoted rather than her. So, I have no interest in the specifics of the suit.

But the principle at stake — Across the nation, should whites, men, and straights finally be declared in no uncertain terms to enjoy the equal protection of the laws, same as the more privileged castes? — is monumental.

Paywall here.

The decision came two years after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions programs in higher education and amid the Trump administration’s fierce efforts to root out programs that promote diversity. The ruling will place further pressure on employers and others to eliminate affirmative action and other initiatives that seek to provide opportunities to members of historically disadvantaged groups.

We’ve had affirmative action for the last 56 years, but that’s not history, evidently. Liberals seem cognitively impaired at remembering anything that has happened involving race since Martin Luther King. Ever since they took control of racial policy, history is all just a blur to them.

Nearly half of the federal appeals courts had required men and white people and other members of majority groups

Men are a majority? Are white people a majority in California and Texas?

to meet a more demanding standard when they sued for workplace discrimination. In eliminating that requirement, the court said that a federal civil rights law demanded equal treatment of all individuals.

The standard for proving workplace discrimination under the law, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the court, “does not vary based on whether or not the plaintiff is a member of a majority group.”

The vote was 9-0 and the black lady justice wrote the opinion in favor of granting equality to whites. A slam dunk.

The text of the law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, does not draw distinctions based on whether the person claiming discrimination is a member of a majority group.

Who knew?

But some courts have required plaintiffs from majority groups to prove an additional element if they lack direct evidence of discrimination: “background circumstances that support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority.”

Uh, what is so unusual during the affirmative action era since 1969, much less during the recent Racial Reckoning, about an employer who discriminates against the majority? I read hundreds of articles in 2020 alone about employers issuing press releases about how they were, in effect, going to discriminate against whites even harder.

Have the federal district judges who ruled that way been at the bottom of a salt mine since, say, Emmett Till’s death?

Lower courts ruled against Ms. Ames on those grounds. …

Justice Jackson wrote that the text of the civil rights law “draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs.”

Indeed, she wrote, “by establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’ — without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group — Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”

Conservative legal groups had championed Ms. Ames’s case, Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, No. 23-1039. The Biden administration also supported her argument, filing a brief supporting Ms. Ames.

Justice Jackson’s opinion was tightly focused and nine pages long. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, issued a 14-page concurring opinion in which he mused about, among other things, the difficulty of defining identity in American society.

For instance, he wrote that it is not always easy to tell who is a member of the “majority.” …

“Even if courts could identify all the relevant racial groups and their boundaries, courts would still struggle to determine which racial groups make up a majority,” he went on. “Black employees in Detroit, for example, make up a majority in their city, but not in Michigan or the United States at large.”

… Justice Thomas also objected to the premise of the appeals court’s decision, which he said had ignored the pervasiveness of diversity programs in the workplace.

“The ‘background circumstances’ rule is nonsensical for an additional reason: It requires courts to assume that only an ‘unusual employer’ would discriminate against those it perceives to be in the majority,” he wrote.

“But,” he added, quoting from a supporting brief, “a number of this nation’s largest and most prestigious employers have overtly discriminated against those they deem members of so-called majority groups. American employers have long been ‘obsessed’ with ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives and affirmative action plans.”

Increasing numbers of conservatives have argued that we must repeal the famous 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But that is exceedingly unlikely to happen.

How about, instead, we just try enforcing the existing equal rights laws, you know, equally?

After a mere two generations, today we finally got clear instructions to do that.