The particulars concern whether Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans in its admissions decisions. Harvard won in the lower courts but the Asian-American plaintiffs have appealed to the High Court. The larger stakes are whether the Supreme Court will wink as America divides in ways that have proved so destructive in the past. The temptation will be for the Justices to give Harvard a pass given its contentious subject. The High Court has already taken cases on gun rights and abortion for the next term starting in the autumn. And you can imagine the reluctance to add the combustible issue of race to the docket. This would be a mistake, and not only on the merits of this case. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out in 2018 when the Court passed on Kansas and Louisiana laws involving Medicaid funds for Planned Parenthood clinics, Supreme Court Justices are given lifetime tenure precisely so that a "politically fraught issue" will not prevent them from applying the law neutrally. This is what is at stake in Harvard. In America today the principle that drove the civil-rights movement—equality for all—is fast giving way to the view that race must be a dominant factor in every decision from college admission to eligibility for a federal farm program to the makeup of corporate boards to who gets priority for a Covid vaccine. Harvard's claim that it doesn't discriminate against Asian-Americans is self-evidently false. In the name of diversity, it favors blacks and Hispanics for admission while pretending that this won't penalize applicants whose race is unfavored. The discrimination manifests itself in the much higher SAT scores required of Asian-Americans, as well as a subjective personality rating system that consistently assigns Asian-Americans far lower scores. It is true that the racial discrimination alleged in Harvard isn't the same as that of the Jim Crow South. In that era federal government intervention was required to break the state-enforced discrimination against black Americans. Race preferences were rooted then in the false claim of African-American inferiority. No one thinks Harvard is discriminating because of animosity toward Asian-Americans, much less because it believes they are inferior. But it is no less ugly when, say, a talented Chinese-American young woman is denied an equal shot at Harvard because of her skin color—and told she must accept this in the name of diversity or to correct for some historic wrong she had no part in. The Supreme Court should address this—not least because of its own role in allowing this allocation by race.