The biggest losers in the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision are not Black people. When you are already in last place economically, you cannot go any lower.

Ironically, good white people in America are the big losers.

I am not attempting to mirror the court’s twisted logic — they said that the 14th Amendment, which was meant to help Black people after the end of slavery, was the reason Black people are being advantaged. That is laughable.

But the decision meant to hurt Black people holds the potential to truly hurt white people. White people (mostly) pay the bill for all those on public assistance. The more folks on public assistance, the more money that is required from white people. We currently have a near $32 trillion national debt.

The court’s decision will increase the wealth and income gap between white and Black Americans. Fortune 500 companies and top organizations primarily recruit from top schools. It will make the weakest economic link in society weaker. We as a nation are only as strong as our weakest link, and the Supreme Court has just made that link more vulnerable.

Today, we spend about $1 trillion annually on public assistance, helping those considered our weakest link. Instead of working to get these folks into productive jobs via the best educational opportunities that they qualify for, we are actually pushing Black people and Hispanics away.

A lack of educational and work opportunities will create more people with little hope and dreams and more poor people requiring public assistance. And that brings an increase in crime.

Good white people and the dogged determination and hard work of Black people and Hispanics can stop this trajectory. But for now, it is simply unsustainable and could destroy America.

A Black leader has knowingly hurt Black people. We have seen moments like this in history before Justice Clarence Thomas.

Booker T. Washington’s speech given at the Atlanta Exposition gave the “go ahead” for the Supreme Court to proceed with codifying the dreaded “separate but equal principle” or the “segregation is just fine” ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson.

Like Thomas, wealthy white people and descendants of slave owners embraced Washington too.

It took more than 50 years to reverse that error of the court with the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Without such a measure, I am not sure if we would have had online email (AOL) or YouTube, as both were developed with the ownership or partial ownership of a Black man. That’s progress.

Colleges must increase the pool of Black and Hispanic applicants. Recruitment and promoting your college are not against the law even if it “helps” Black people, I think.

Aggressively and creatively working to increase the pool of Black and Hispanic applicants through outreach programs, use of alumni and early recruitment (which is done for the military academies) could mitigate the court’s decision.

The Asian-Americans involved in the case were not discriminated against, and no one was able to prove that they were wrongfully rejected from Harvard. There was no disparate treatment. The Harvard student body is made up of 19% Asian Americans, despite that group being only 7% of the U.S. population. Thirty percent of the students admitted into Harvard this year were Asian Americans. Where is the problem?

The court solved a problem that did not exist.

Oh, someone should let Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. know that his dream has been realized. Shocking. A color-blind society? That remains a noble goal.

I am sure it was the joke of the week in every Black barbershop in the land. Thomas is arguably the most hated Black man in America among Black people. He is close kin to the Black man in Africa who helped wealthy white men capture Black people for the slave trade.

Yet, at one time, Thomas proclaimed to his staff at the EEOC that without affirmative action he did not know where he would be in life as a Black man. Now he is the leader of the effort to pull the ladder up out of the reach of future Black students.

Lastly, to rightly say that the U.S. military academies can use race as a factor in admissions while other educational institutions cannot is interesting. What is good for our nation’s military should be good for our nation’s civilians.

A colorblind society? Here is a quiz for the Supreme Court: I would love to see a list of Black and Hispanic law clerks who served under each of the six justices who voted to eliminate affirmative action. We may learn that the only color these justices see is white.

It is up to good white people to stand up and fight, maybe not so much for Black people, but for themselves and for America. Remember, we are only as strong as our weakest link.

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