Be angry at the Supreme Court. It may be the only path forward.

Of all the words that were unfurled in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to kill off affirmative action last week, three sentences in the last paragraph of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 69-page dissent might have offered the most hope for those of us searching for solace in this consistently unjust and unfair world of ours.

“Society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted,” the lone Latina justice on the court wrote. “Diversity is now a fundamental American value, housed in our varied and multicultural American community that only continues to grow. The pursuit of racial diversity will go on.”

Before that hopeful nod to progress marching on, Sotomayor held nothing back in her dissent of the pathetic and predictable 6-3 conservative majority ruling.

Sotomayor called the court’s decision to strike another blow on the endless road to equality for people of color an “unjustified exercise of power” that “will serve only to highlight the Court’s own impotence in the face of an America whose cries for equality resound.”

Her colleague, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was equally blistering in her dissent, saying the court acted with “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” that announces “‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”

The rage expressed by these two women of color is undoubtedly familiar to any Black or brown woman who is compelled to work within a broken institution.

The racism here is easily recognizable, too. The bigotry behind the decision rubber-stamps the idea that affirmative action is somehow a golden hand that swings open any door for unqualified people of color and allows them to take a seat, any seat.

Every person of color has their own stories along these lines. But I, for one, have lost count of the number of times a white person has not just assumed I’ve gotten to my position through affirmative action, but that I am also in possession of a Brown Girl E-ZPass that waves me into any classroom or newsroom or space of my choosing. Because I am a woman — check — and a Latina — check.

Living in this country as a woman of color is learning to live with a million tiny cuts of racism and sexism, of micro- and macroaggressions, sometimes at the hands of people who look like you. Irony doesn’t even begin to cover Justice Clarence Thomas’ crab-in-a-barrel move to dismantle a program that gave him the opportunity to be a student at Yale Law School and then a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it also means living under the expectation to keep one’s daily disappointment and disgust and anger in check, lest we be viewed as the stereotypical Angry Black (or Brown) Woman.

Anger is a justifiable response to insidious inequality. This inequality persists, despite national cries for racial reckonings in the last three years — and those reckonings have fueled a dehumanizing and demoralizing backlash. Spoiler alert: The backlash isn’t based on reality.

A recent piece in Time magazine authored by a member of The Inquirer’s board of directors critiqued many diversity efforts as having been “cosmetic, performative, and perfunctory.” But then, what did we expect when so many institutions put the very people who created or cosigned systems of inequity in charge of racial reckonings?

The shortsightedness has been infuriating, but on most days, I’m not completely ready to give up, because progress is fueled by fury.

Anger can be dangerous, especially when it’s rooted in ignorance and fear that can destroy and dismantle. We’ve seen that these last few years, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to bans against books and assaults on Black history and LGBTQ rights.

But anger rooted in righting unfairness and injustice can also be a powerful tool.

We’ve seen that in a lot of the history some are so determined to erase. We saw that during the 2022 midterm elections when after the court upended long-standing legal precedent last June and took away a woman’s federally guaranteed right to obtain an abortion, furious women and young people helped Democrats defy expectations and win elections in Pennsylvania and around the nation.

I predict we’ll see that again.

Not surprisingly, even at her most blistering, there was an elegance and eloquence in Sotomayor’s anger. But as a fellow Nuyorican — Sotomayor also grew up in the Bronx — I could hear in her words echoes of the “Bet – bring it!” that often preceded a fistfight in my old neighborhood.

And it’s that spirit that must come next — the battle to dismantle outmoded systems and build something new, something better that gets us closer to the principles this country has never quite met for too many of its citizens.

As angry as I, and so many others, am at the arrogance of privilege wielded against the less powerful, I agree with Sotomayor when she writes that “society’s progress toward equality cannot be permanently halted.”

I also know reaching equality won’t be easy, and it won’t be fast.

But Sotomayor’s closing words renewed my faith that with righteous rage, a world so regularly unjust and unfair might one day be able to right itself.