Affirmative action is racial justice. The Supreme Court ruling is a step backward.

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race as a factor in the college admissions process on Thursday, the court delivered a death blow to the practice that is commonly known as affirmative action.

Many Americans will believe that a great moral wrong has been corrected. They will convince themselves that Black students have been forced to give up some special privilege. And as right-wing activists tally yet another win in their war against racial justice, affirmative action’s plot in the graveyard of American history has been hastily marked with a headstone spanning the years 1961 to 2023.

Created under the Kennedy administration by an executive order instructing government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” the practice was meant to give equal opportunity to Black Americans and other people of color. But in 1965, the Johnson administration issued an executive order adding sex to the list of protected classes. Since then, white women have become the main beneficiaries of affirmative action programs, but that fact is often obscured because the fight against affirmative action is about race, not gender. To be blunt, right-wing activists aren’t fighting to abolish racial preferences. They’re fighting to maintain them.

Racial preference is the bedrock of nearly every American institution. That’s why churches are segregated, in direct opposition to Scriptures that speak to unity in the faith. That’s why Black neighborhoods were redlined, carving out the places where banks refused to lend. It’s the reason that even now, when redlining is illegal, appraisals of Black homes are routinely undervalued, and when Black people want their homes to be fairly valued, they are forced to remove all signs that a Black family ever lived there.

Racial preference plays out through institutional policies and lack of access to quality health care, which leads to higher mortality rates for Black mothers, disproportionate stroke and heart attack rates for Black men, and Black people living shorter lives than our white counterparts. We make less money for doing the same work as white people and are denied mortgages at a rate 80% higher than our white counterparts.

But the generational nature of racial preference is cemented into American culture through education. From underfunding schools in Black communities to allowing toxic materials to languish in Black school buildings, to disproportionately denying college admission to qualified Black applicants, America has used education to maintain and perpetuate inequality. That’s why it was so important for right-wing activists to abolish any effort to correct racial disparities in higher education. Keeping affirmative action would give at least some African Americans a chance to compete on a level playing field. That has never been the American way.

In the wake of a ruling that forbids colleges and universities from addressing the very real injustices that Black people continue to face in America, African Americans must look to the future while learning from the past. We must realize that in a country that has designed its systems to our detriment, the fight for freedom and equality is never-ending.

We watched as the Voting Rights Act, which passed in 1965, was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, thus stripping away federal protections that benefited Black voters. Now we see the attack on affirmative action, which began in 1961, coming to its inevitable end.

The lesson here is clear: Those who seek to prevent racial equality will patiently work for decades, putting the conditions in place to assure their desired outcome. They will elect presidents, build senatorial majorities, change the rules for Supreme Court confirmation, and even lavish their preferred jurists with unreported gifts.

Therefore, African Americans must jealously guard each victory with the same vigilance as those who fight to reverse them. We must seek out allies who will fight alongside us. We must know that our wins are never the ending. More often, they are just the beginning.