To some, the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger was a victory. To others, a defeat. Some praised Grutter and its companion case, Gratz v. Bollinger, as a lawyerlike compromise. Others scorned the opinions as a patchwork that confused admissions officers and the public.

To us, Grutter is a welcome affirmation of the value of diversity in higher education, government, and the workplace. As Justice O’Connor’s opinion for the Court eloquently recognized, “[e]ffective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized.”

At the same time, Grutter is also a stark summons to take seriously the persistent racism that makes affirmative action necessary. As the Court acknowledged, in our society “race unfortunately still matters.”

Whether we celebrate the remedy upheld in Grutter or think it misguided, we need to come together in the realization that race does still matter in the United States. We must tackle that racism now—not only because the Grutter majority warned that the Constitution may not countenance affirmative action forever, but because defeating discrimination is essential to our future.

America today is home to some of the most racially segregated cities in the world. In 2000, blacks and whites living in Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and Chicago were almost as segregated as were blacks and whites living in South Africa under apartheid. Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans are increasingly isolated from whites.

This segregation is not accidental. Careful studies show that blacks face ongoing discrimination in real estate rentals, sales, and mortgage approvals. Blacks fare worse than whites in these markets even when they present identical assets and family configurations. That levels of housing discrimination against Latinos increase with the darkness of their skin underscores the racial nature of the prejudice.

Residential segregation affects schooling. Almost three quarters of African American and Latino children today attend schools in which nonwhites are the majority. With the end of judicially enforced desegregation, integrating schools have resegregated. And these minority schools receive fewer resources and have less experienced teachers than white schools.

Even in affluent, predominantly white schools, minority children are shunted to nonacademic tracks. Controlled studies show that teachers respond differently to white and nonwhite children, giving less feedback, fewer positive responses, and reduced coaching to minority children than to white ones offering the same answers.

Children as young as preschoolers grasp the salience of race in our society, and white children taunt their nonwhite peers. As teenagers, nonwhites experience more suspicion and hostility from shopkeepers and passers-by than their white classmates. The police are far more likely to stop a well-dressed black male than a poorly dressed white.

The discrimination continues when minorities enter the workforce. Despite a growing appreciation for diversity, controlled studies demonstrate that white job applicants receive more interviews and job offers than nonwhites with identical credentials. In recent surveys, employers are surprisingly candid in openly expressing an aversion to people of color and describing the tactics they use to prevent minorities from applying for jobs.

Affirmative action in higher education helps overcome racism; empirical studies show that students at racially mixed campuses learn to trust people of different races. Racially diverse graduates help build racially diverse workplaces, which further promote understanding and racial integration.

But we need to do much more: We need to grow beyond Grutter.

Constructive dialogue on racial issues doesn’t just happen on university campuses. Our responsibility as educators cannot end with admitting a diverse student body. As professors, we have the power to structure the learning environments and the experiences of students on our campuses. We need to seize those opportunities to make the most of the diversity affirmative action gives us.

As educators and practicing lawyers, we also need to make sure that the process begun in college and law school carries through to the workplace. We can’t assume that a dash of affirmative action in university admissions and seven years in a diverse—but sometimes racially uneasy—academic environment is enough to overcome a history of discrimination and life in a society in which “race unfortunately still matters.”

We need to ask, as responsible bar associations and legal employers are doing, why we don’t have more nonwhite judges and law firm partners. We need to inquire about the climate for nonwhite lawyers in their workplaces, in court, and with clients. And we need to ask whether it was necessary for several states to raise the passing score on bar exams during the last ten years—just as significant numbers of minority students were graduating from law school—when lower passing scores sufficed for the whiter students who graduated in the 1970s and ‘80s.

As leaders of our communities, we also need to take responsibility for the discrimination in housing, education, and the workplace that surrounds us all. Prejudice is individual, but the best tools for combating bias are collective.

Few of us see racism in our own conduct. Most of us think of discrimination as someone else’s fault. But most acts of discrimination have their origin in unconscious biases, not overt racism or a conscious desire to treat nonwhites differently. A visit to the Project Implicit website, which allows individuals to test their own leanings, demonstrates the ubiquity of racial bias. The research on that site and elsewhere amply confirms that race still matters for most of us.

There are three proven ways to combat this bias. First, we need to create more opportunities for everyone to interact with people of all races. In our society, most whites unconsciously assign the burden of integration to nonwhites. Whites ask why the black students are all sitting together in the cafeteria—rather than questioning whether any white students approached that table to join their classmates or invited students of color to join them.

For people who grow up in highly segregated neighborhoods and schools, as almost all Americans do, integration is not easy. We have to make continuing conscious efforts to bring together people of all races.

Second, courts and government agencies must enforce existing civil rights laws on an ongoing basis and with dedication and steadfastness. The impact of the Grutter opinion on the public debate about affirmative action demonstrates the legitimating role court decisions can have in our society.

Third, we need to design pro-active structures that eliminate the discriminatory effects of bias in education, as well as in housing, labor, and consumer markets. Our civil rights statutes were a tremendous advance in the battle against racism. But they too assign the burden of overcoming discrimination to nonwhites. Nonwhites must identify a specific culprit, register a complaint (ranging from an informal protest to a formal lawsuit), and produce evidence of a discriminatory act. The stakes are high for both parties in these confrontations because our system assumes that racism is rare in America and that only a few consciously biased individuals could be guilty of such an act.

To genuinely confront racism, we must first acknowledge that prejudice in our society is widespread--albeit largely unconscious. Having accepted this fact about ourselves, we can then work to design systems that overcome the effects of racism and gradually reduce those biases within us.

The Supreme Court’s ringing endorsement of diversity in Grutter is cause for celebration. But the four most important words in the opinion are “race unfortunately still matters.” Only by accepting that judgment and working diligently to overcome racism in all its manifestations, can we hope to meet the Court’s goal of ending affirmative action in twenty-five years.

We spent the twenty-five years since Bakke learning how to do affirmative action and defending its practice. Let’s spend the next quarter century defeating racism and making affirmative action unnecessary. Let’s grow beyond Grutter.

Barbara Reskin is a Past President of the American Sociological Association and the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington

Bill Lann Lee is a former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and a partner at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann and Bernstein, LLP

September 5, 2003