What Jim Crow segregation, racial balancing and black separatism share is an insistence that students be sorted according to race.

Brown had forbidden segregation in public schools but had not required racial balancing.

Opponents of affirmative action don't buy conservative arguments that racial balancing is acceptable.

That would amount to outright racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional.

Stripped of its "critical mass" veil, the law school's program is revealed as a naked effort to achieve racial balancing.

The Court recognizes that such an interest "would amount to outright racial balancing, which is patently unconstitutional."

But this is precisely the type of racial balancing that the Court itself calls "patently unconstitutional."

Not all Republicans see the harm of racial balancing in public schools in the same stark terms.

The schools base their numbers in demographics, therefore making this goal a means to achieve a numerical quota to achieve racial balancing.

Roberts concludes that racial balancing cannot be a compelling state interest.