In the decade from the Declaration to the Constitution every state north of the Mason Dixon line, and north of the Ohio River, either abolished slave… - Harry V. Jaffa

Affirmative action, rightly understood, would justify a wide variety of outreach programs for those whose lives have been stultified by poverty, broken families, bad schools, and neighborhoods filled with drugs, crime and gangs. One can heartily commend a program for tutoring young blacks, or young whites, who had never had a genuine teacher in a real classroom. One cannot, however, commend a program of raising the grades of young blacks, but not young whites, without having raised their skills. And what possible justification can there be there for giving scholarship assistance to the child of a black middle-class family, while denying it to a poor white? Can one imagine a more crass disregard for the genuine meaning of the Equal Protection Clause? The priests of this new religion of 'affirmative action' are not without material interests. Hundreds of millions of corporate dollars are spent annually on 'sensitivity training'. Within the universities, centers for black, brown and women's (i.e., feminist) studies are being established, with vast amount of patronage bestowed upon them. Traditional courses in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare and the Bible continue to appear in the catalogs, but they are increasingly taught by 'deconstructionists', who have no interest in the texts, but only in subjective reactions to the texts.

Now there's a little story to that. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott decision—which said that the Missouri Compromise restriction of slavery in 1820 and any other one, was unconstitutional—said that there was no power in the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories. And he added as a kind of obiter dictum that the only power of Congress over slavery in the territories was the power coupled with the duty of protecting the owner and his rights. Now the seven states of the Deep South interpreted that to mean that the police power of the federal government had to guarantee the integrity of the property of any slave owner going into any United States territory.

No result of the Civil War was more fundamental than the authoritative assertion of the inclusion of human beings of any color and any ethnicity in the proposition of human equality. A consensus in favor of the colorblind Constitution is provided by the logic of reality and the logic of history.