This is a ‘Jackie Robinson moment,’ but not the one Hakeem Jeffries thinks it is

“It’s a Jackie Robinson moment.” That declaration by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries struck a curious chord because Jeffries was calling for Black athletes to boycott SEC conference teams to protest not the existence but the elimination of racial discrimination.

Jeffries was upset that the court had ended racial gerrymandering designed to guarantee the election of non-white (and largely Democratic) House members. It was as if Jackie Robinson were to join a protest calling for the return of race-based discrimination in baseball.

Robinson played his first year in the Negro League before becoming the first African-American player in the Major Leagues when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. 

He ushered in a new era in baseball, in which race had no role in competitive sports. There would be no racial division of leagues, no race quotas and no segregation — just an equal playing field.

Almost 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found that racial quotas in university admissions violated the 14th Amendment. The court later declared all racial preferences to be unconstitutional. Yet, for decades, a form of political affirmative action has persisted under the Voting Rights Act, where federal courts required racial gerrymandering to guarantee the election of minority members to Congress.

That ended with the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which found that was also unlawful racial discrimination.

The Callais decision brought something long missing from our constitutional jurisprudence: consistency. In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”........

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