Today in the US and Great Britain race distinctions determine rights, with "people of color" having higher rights than white citizens who have been reduced to second class legal status based on skin color.

Alfred W. Blumrosen, Compliance Chief of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, made white Americans second-class citizens when in defiance of the statutory language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the US Constitution he established a system of racial privileges for black Americans in university admissions, employment and promotion.  The system of racial privileges Blumrosen established forced universities to admit black students ahead of more qualified whites and forced employers to hire and promote blacks ahead of more qualified whites.  Blumrosen's system of disparate rights in violation of the 14th Amendment was hidden under the term "affirmative action."  (See The New Color Line, 1995.)

Universities, employers, and the judicial system complied with Blumrosen's illegal and unconstitutional dictate for 58 years.  After more than a half century of holding back more qualified whites in order to give racial preference to less qualified blacks, on June 29, 2023, the US Supreme Court banned race-based admission privileges for blacks, but as Heather Mac Donald wrote in The City Journal the Court's ruling left open ways around the prohibition.

Indeed, as Renu Mukherjee reports in the Autumn 2023 issue of The City Journal, the Supreme Court's ruling is being vacated by the abolishment of objective merit-based standards in school admissions by both universities and elite high schools.  Racial preferences are used indirectly through such schemes as an Economic Need Index and poverty rates that guarantee a certain portion of admissions to those in these categories.  These schemes are called "race-neutral" although they have a disproportionate effect on unfavored races.   Mukherjee explains the schemes in The City Journal.